Palmer woman faces jail time, fine for texting while driving

PALMER — Is honesty always the best policy? Emerald Kroeker isn’t so sure anymore.

On Saturday, Kroeker, 21, was driving on Trunk Road near College Drive when an Alaska State Trooper pulled her over for weaving across the fog line.

“I’ll just be perfectly honest with you — I was texting,” she remembers telling the trooper.

She said she’s been stopped for speeding before and has decided that being forthright is a good policy in traffic stops.

“It’s better for me to be honest rather than to be shady and try to hide,” she said.

The trooper wrote her a summons and gave her a court date in April. The maximum penalty, she said, is a year in jail and a $10,000 fine. It’s likely she won’t get nearly that much.

Talking to Kroeker, you get the sense that if all that had resulted from this was a summons, she’d probably have been fine with it. She said she knows she shouldn’t have been texting. She was talking to a friend about a fight she’d had with another friend. It could have waited until she was parked.

But Alaska District Court isn’t all she’s up against. There’s also the court of public opinion.

Texting while driving is a relatively new law in Alaska, one it has taken lawmakers some time to get right. Law enforcement has cast doubt on the law’s usefulness.

The news media has been paying attention. And, likely because of that, her case — which is only a misdemeanor — wound up in newspapers, on television and on the radio.

Her name is not a common one either, so when it’s out there people know it’s her. And some of those who caught those reports have not been very nice either.

“My sister goes to UAA and her teachers have been calling her out, saying really rude things about me to her,” Kroeker said. “My grandma on the Slope has been getting the same thing.”

She said that none of those media outlets reached out to her to get her side. She also said some also made assumptions in their reporting. She said one outlet phrased the story of her arrest by saying troopers caught her texting.

“There’s a big difference between being caught doing something and ratting yourself out, which is what I did,” she said.

Kroeker said a lot of people have told her she shouldn’t have said anything. She should have kept her mouth shut.

“I’ve had people from my church say I shouldn’t have said anything or I should’ve lied,” she said.

But she said she still thinks honesty was the way to go. And she thinks that telling people they shouldn’t cooperate sends the wrong message.

“Is that what you want, or do you want people to be cooperative?” she asked.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.