Officers named in Wasilla motorist shooting

WASILLA — Names were released Wednesday evening of two officers who shot and killed a suspected drunken driver Sunday after he allegedly turned his vehicle on them.

Involved in the shooting were six-year Alaska State Trooper veteran Daron Cooper and Wasilla Police Officer Brandon Gray, who has two years on the force.

Multiple officers were involved in chasing the white Chevy pickup as it fled that night. The call began when the vehicle was reported as a possible drunk driver while it was in a parking lot at Parks Highway and Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

When a trooper approached the pickup on foot, the driver sped out of the Fred Meyer parking lot, driving north in the southbound Parks Highway lanes before hopping the median and turning in to the neighborhoods off of Hermon Road. The chase ended at the intersection of Whispering Woods Drive and Seward Meridian Parkway, when the pickup spun in a circle surrounded by patrol cars.

Troopers say that a Wasilla police officer was out of his vehicle on foot when the driver started backing the pickup toward him. That’s when officers shot and killed the driver, Gordon E. Samel, 52, of Wasilla.

Media accounts of Samel’s past describe him as a beloved family man with a history of mental illness that blotted his criminal record. Frontiersman archives contain an account of a brief rampage he went on in 2011, trying to board a bus full of high school students while swearing, threatening to kill all the cats in the world, then dousing a porch with gasoline and setting it alight. Accounts at the time said he was under the influence of cocaine during the incident.

Samel also had a brief brush with history in 1992. He was one of the moose hunters who found the decaying body of Christopher McCandless who starved to death in a derelict bus on a trail near Denali National Park.

McCandless was the subject of a book and a movie titled “Into the Wild” and has become a kind of folk hero to people who take inspiration from his rejection of the trappings of his privileged upbringing. Critics say the tale has been romanticized, that McCandless was a mixed-up young man who died as a result of his own failure to prepare to survive in the wilds of Alaska.

Officer Gray was with the now-defunct Houston Police Department before he was hired on at Wasilla. By the time that department disappeared he’d already moved on.

Cooper is a police dog handler, a so-called K-9 unit for the troopers. His dog’s name is Blazer and is a Belgian malinois.

Cooper’s name comes up in Frontiersman archives as one of five troopers to fire their service pistols Nov. 14, 2009, at a distraught woman who had been threatening a wheelchair-bound man with a shotgun at a home off of Wasilla-Fishhook Road. A review by state investigators and prosecutors cleared Cooper and the other four officers in that shooting, which Nora York, 58, of Wasilla was killed after she refused to disarm and pointed the gun at two troopers.

Cooper’s name is also tied in archives to three other chases: in October 2013, in which a suspected punched Blazer in the head; in September 2013 in which the chase was suspended because it got too dangerous, but the driver later crashed and Cooper and Blazer chased him down; and a third in July 2012 in which a fleeing suspect knocked down power lines and caused a transformer to explode, which knocked out power to a neighborhood.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.