Rumors muddle search for teen

PALMER — The mother of the last boy to see Trenton Tunohun before the teen went missing earlier this week said the boys are getting a bum rap in the media.

“I’ve read some of the things that have come out on the story and it’s really skewed and it’s really not that fair to him,” said Tammy Argend. “They were camping and I think somebody brought a six-pack — which shouldn’t have happened, absolutely — but it’s not like they were up there tearing it up.”

She said the night Tunohun went missing, two adults approached the boys and the two girls they were with.

“He had punched his girlfriend in the face several times and she asked these boys for help,” and the boys helped, she said.

The disturbance brought the police and the kids ran. The two girls hid in the woods, Tunohun and Argend’s son kept running. The police say Tunohun was last seen heading back to his campsite and hasn’t been seen since. Argend’s son made his way on foot into Palmer.

Argend said she knew Tunohun well. He’d been staying at her house for a good portion of the summer. She said he’d just graduated with honors from the Alaska Military Youth Academy and was getting ready to go to basic training.

Part of Argend’s story the police back up.

“It’s my understanding, from reports anyway, that the two adults were fighting together and the kids tried to intervene,” said Palmer Emergency Services Director Jon Owen.

But Detective Sergeant Kelly Turney said questions police have to answer, like whether the boys exacerbated the situation — there’s some indication they may have — or how much of a fight it really was, are yet to be determined.

Turney is investigating Tunohun’s disappearance and said some witnesses are giving a consistent account and some aren’t. What makes it even more difficult is that the rumor mill is in full swing.

“We get phone calls probably daily, or at least have since Trenton went missing,” Turney said. “Every single rumor we have to track until there’s some kind of resolution.”

Turney said police have talked to all three teenagers and are trying to seek out the two adults.

“The female’s got a felony warrant so she doesn’t want to be found and they’re both kind of homeless,” he said.

Police, he said, have spent a lot of time this summer responding to the Matanuska River Bridge, which marks the edge of city limits.

“The Butte side, it kind of turned into a tent city this summer,” he said, with a mix of partiers and genuinely homeless people. “The problem was it kind of turned into the place to be if you didn’t have any other place to be.”

That situation made it somewhat difficult for Palmer police, since the partiers and the homeless were in a public access area, leaving police with little authority to tell them to move on.

“If they were camping on the Palmer side we would say there’s no camping allowed, there’s an ordinance,” Turney said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.