Valley news in 2011 was shocking, uplifting

Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part series looking back on what made news in the Valley in 2011. Visit Frontiersman.com for more top stories of 2011.

MAT-SU - From the shocking death of the Valley top school official to a harrowing account of a bear attack, 2011 was eventful in the Valley.

But you don't have to take our word for it. The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman's website - Frontiersman.com - is a popular choice for local stories and breaking news. In 2011, nearly 1.8 million visitors to the newspaper online viewed more than 4.7 million pages of local news.

As 2011 comes to a close, we look back on the most popular news, according to you - our online readers. The top-viewed stories each month are featured.

JULY

Death shocks Valley

PALMER - Mat-Su Borough Schools Superintendent Kenneth Stephen Burnley, 69, was recovering from routine knee surgery at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage when he suddenly became ill and died early Saturday morning, leaving district administrators and others in the Valley stunned and saddened.

"We went to see him Thursday and he was still recovering, but he was happy that the governor approved a lot of the projects for Mat-Su," Erick Cordero, vice president of the school board, said Saturday morning after Acting Superintendent Deena Paramo called an emergency meeting. "He was working, thinking about work and he was sad that he couldn't run again because it was high impact for his knees, but I said, ‘We're just going to have to get you a bike.'"

State takes measures as dam deteriorates

WASILLA - That knock on the door Friday from Verne Rupright was not the first-term mayor politicking to retain his seat. For residents on Lake Lucille or Lucille Creek, he was there with an important message.

The 40-plus-year-old wooden dam spillway at the west outlet of the lake is nearing the end of its useful life. It's rotting, one of its four supports has failed and is on the verge of partial or total failure. That's a message Rupright had hand-delivered to affected residents.

"Well, I did that because, when you mail stuff, a lot of times people go ‘we didn't know,'" he said. "I figured the direct, personal touch on this, especially when you're talking about letting the lake drain and drop a number of feet, would seem to me to have an adverse affect on property values."

In fact, the dam's condition has deteriorated to the point that the state Department of Fish and Game today is installing flood control below it on the creek, said James Hasbrouck, Southcentral Region supervisor for Fish and Game. Hasbrouk was peppered with questions Monday by Wasilla City Council during its regular meeting.

Teens talk about bear attack

PALMER - Shane Garlock can still hear the screaming in his head.

Two days after surviving an attack by a bear attack that mauled four of a group of seven teens hiking in the Talkeetna Mountains, Garlock said the sounds are still fresh.

"Whenever I tell this, I usually outline the screaming that I could hear from my friends and the growls from the bear, which were loud and deep," he said. "The screamings were just helpless screaming, and I can still hear it in my head."

Along with seeing his companions covered in blood and the chaos of the attack's aftermath, Garlock said his memories of Saturday's attack are still vivid.

He said he remembers the aftermath of the attack, "seeing my friends' faces with blood on it, but eyes were perfectly clean - perfect blue eyes just seemed to stand out, and that's another thing that really freaked me out."

AUGUST

Menard ‘truly sorry' for actions

WASILLA - Wasilla City Councilman Steve Menard has publicly apologized for damaging a Sitka hotel room while on city business earlier this month.

The apology came during a statement Menard made during Monday's regular city council meeting before the council adjourned to an executive session. That was to discuss his behavior at the Alaska Municipal League summer meetings, which left the city picking up a $350 cleaning tab for Menard's hotel room at the Westmark Sitka.

"I would like to start off by apologizing publicly for my actions in Sitka," Menard said. "To the city of Wasilla, my friends and fami

Cook Inlet plane crash survivors tell harrowing tale

MAT-SU - As soon as the floatplane's engine dropped from a roar to an idle 3,000 feet over Cook Inlet, everyone in the Cessna 185 knew something was very wrong.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody panicked.

The plane began dropping out of the sky.

Pilot Scott Johannes set to work looking for what had suddenly gone so wrong with the fuel system: valves, pumps, controls, breakers - the aviator's checklist when the power cuts out.

"I immediately realized it was something serious. I looked - we were 20 miles off the coastline and four to five miles the other way. I just immediately turned the plane toward Kalgin Island," said Johannes, a 48-year-old from Wasilla.

In fewer than five minutes, Johannes would have to bring the plane down in wind-chopped, six-foot seas and hope for the best.

Man guilty on a dozen rape counts

PALMER - Zebulon Whisler was found guilty Thursday on 12 of 15 counts he faced for raping six women over the course of six years.

After a day of deliberation, a Palmer jury chose to convict Whisler of six counts each of first- and second-degree sexual assault.

The case first came to light after a woman who had gone on a date with Whisler went to Alaska State Troopers, saying she'd been raped while they sat in his pickup parked on Lazy Mountain. Troopers investigated and found the other five women.

SEPTEMBER

Three Bears latest in string of burglaries

WASILLA - Alaska State Troopers don't have a whole lot to say about a pretty visible break-in at a major Valley business.

According to trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters, this is all she can say about the break-in at the Three Bears grocery store on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway:

"What I've been able to release thus far is that the store had items stolen from it sometime during the night between Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, the items were noticed missing and AST was contacted. Troopers responded to the store and began an investigation. It is an ongoing investigation."

Further details were not available as of press time, she said.

Accounts on Facebook seemed to indicate that officers from multiple agencies were at the store for a good portion of the day Sunday.

One of the questions Peters declined to answer was whether the break-in had anything to do with a rash of local burglaries recently striking the businesses between Palmer and Wasilla.

Information from law enforcement has been scarce, but starting sometime around Labor Day, more than a half-dozen businesses have been broken into, including stores and dance studios, storage units and contractors.

Battlefield Cross Memorial dedicated at Wasilla High

WASILLA - It started as an ordinary day. He emailed his father a joke at 7:59 a.m. He spoke with his wife on the phone a few minutes after 9 a.m.

Then at 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people on the plane, including the hijackers, and 125 people inside the Pentagon.

ET1 Ronald J. Hemenway worked for the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon when he was killed Sept. 11, 2001.

His remains and those of four others were never found. He was 37.

His parents, Robert and Shirley Hemenway, traveled to Alaska from their home in Shawnee, Kan., to be part of a dedication ceremony at Wasilla High School at 3 p.m., Sunday when a 46-inch-tall bronze Battlefield Cross Memorial will be dedicated in his memory.

Hemenway graduated from Wasilla High in 1982 and went on to attend the University of Alaska Fairbanks before enlisting in the Navy at age 30.

"This isn't for us," Robert Hemenway said Thursday. "We'd like them to remember our son, Ron. But also what it means to lose 3,000 lives in vain."

Menard recall clears hurdle, faces more

WASILLA - Efforts to recall city councilman Steve Menard hit a bump in the road but might be back on track.

The application for a recall petition filed Sept. 2 cites misconduct in office during a now-infamous city trip to Sitka last month to attend the Alaska Municipal League's summer meeting. Menard checked out of a hotel room there but staff demanded $350 to fix damage he'd done to the room, including a burned mattress, a chair that had been urinated on and vomit on the carpet. The city paid the bill so Menard could fly back home, but immediately sent him a bill.

Menard has since apologized, told the public he is cleaning up his act and quitting drinking and refunded the $1,400 cost of the trip. And his fellow city council have barred him from traveling on city business for the remainder of his term.

Members of the Conservative Patriots Group, which filed the recall application, have said they don't think council went far enough in sanctioning Menard. They say they don't want someone who behaves that way while conducting public business to represent them on the council.

OCTOBER

Voters favor incumbents, bonds

MAT-SU - Voters were feeling generous and mostly OK with the people already representing them in Tuesday night's election.

Each municipal body will have to certify the results before they can be deemed official, which usually takes a week or two. In the Mat-Su Borough races, as of 9:20 p.m. Tuesday, only Sutton hadn't reported in but even if all 972 registered voters in the area went to the polls and voted the same way only the $214-million raft of school bonds could be swayed. Voter turnout borough-wide was 12.88 percent of registered voters as of 9:20 p.m.

Starting with the Mat-Su Borough: voters chose to approve both sets of bond propositions. That massive raft of bonds to implement a five-year plan for school improvements passed 4,090 to 3,547. The $32-million package of road bonds passed 4,517 to 3,059. The other ballot proposition, approving the new lines for borough assembly district redrawn to reflect changes in the 2010 census passed handily - 5,235 to 2,071.

There were no incumbents running for borough assembly. The closest borough race was the one between Steve Colligan and Pat Johnson to replace Mark Ewing representing Wasilla. Unofficial tallies had Colligan up 114, with 641 ballots to Johnson's 527. Darcie Salmon didn't have an opponent in his election to replace Cindy Bettine who'd reached her limit of two terms representing the Knik-Big Lake area. Unofficial tallies showed 108 voters chose to write in another candidate. Salmon took in 840 votes.

KGB conundrum: Road carries more vehicles than capacity

KNIK - So what are we going to do about Knik-Goose Bay Road?

The road is really the only feasible route to bring traffic from the main state artery of the Parks Highway to both the soon-to-open Goose Creek Correctional Center and the expanding Port MacKenzie area.

And everyone agrees that if the Knik Arm Bridge is built, a lot of the traffic using it will be spawned in the neighborhoods around Knik-Goose Bay Road. These areas are already the fastest growing in the Mat-Su Borough. And the bridge will likely accelerate their pace of growth.

So while truck traffic will likely need another road entirely - one that bypasses Wasilla - for the bridge to be useful, car traffic is a whole different story.

So is the road ready to handle it?

Nope.

"KGB and the Parks Highway are kind of in the same boat - they both need to be widened out to four lanes to handle even the amount of traffic they're handling now," said borough transportation planner Brad Sworts.

Wasilla man charged with murdering his neighbor

WASILLA - A 37-year-old man was jailed Saturday after police say he shot and killed his 45-year-old neighbor.

"On Oct. 1 at approximately (6:35 p.m.), Dale E. Prater, age (45), of Wasilla, died of an apparent gunshot wound in Wasilla. Phillip Bailey, age 37, of Wasilla, was arrested and charged with the death of Prater. The case is still under investigation," reads the entirety of the police press release on the incident.

Court records Monday afternoon show Bailey was charged with a single count of murder. He'd already made one court appearance and is set for another on Oct. 12.

Dawn Syers lived with Prater in the white, two-story, four-plex on Fanciful Place with kids' toys outside where he lived upstairs from Bailey. She said she and Prater planned to fly to Las Vegas to be married on Halloween.

"Elvis was going to walk me down the aisle. We had everything paid for. We were going to use our dividends for spending money," she said.

Houston Hawk takes flight

HOUSTON - Cody Dennis, 14, died in Washington at around midnight, Monday after a 10-month fight against a form of bone cancer.

His parents Misty and Brian Dennis said their family is planning a memorial service in Washington where they've been receiving medical care since December 2010 when Cody was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. No information about local services is available at this time.

"We're planning a memorial here in Washington and then we'll do a celebration of life for him when we get back to Alaska," Misty said.

The initial onset came after Cody attended a friend's birthday party and came home complaining of pain in his leg.

Misty said when she asked him how he hurt his leg, he said all he was doing was stomping in puddles, so she thought it was the kind of mild injury that would mend itself. But during basketball practice, later she said she could see her Cody was in a lot of pain and was limping down the court.

NOVEMBER

3 die in rollover

CHICKALOON - A Valdez woman and her two children died Thursday afternoon when their Toyota SUV left the Glenn Highway near Mile 86 and landed upside down in pond near Long Lake, about Mile 86 of the Glenn Highway.

Patrol Troopers and members of the Bureau of Highway Patrol, South Central Team responded to the area about 4:40 p.m. after a passerby saw the vehicle's lights beneath the water and called 911, according to dispatch communications during the response.

Alaska State Trooper Spokeswoman Megan Peters said investigation determined that Leah Thompson, 28, of Valdez, and her two children - Avery McIntosh, 5, and Trinity McIntosh, 7 - were traveling southbound on the Glenn Highway when Thompson lost control of the Toyota and slid off the road. The vehicle rolled at least once, coming to rest partially submerged in Long Lake, Peters said.

Wasilla teen saves 5-year-old from hot tub mishap

WASILLA - Cassie Nix only briefly met Anthony Keller the morning of Oct. 2 - in fact, she doesn't remember the meeting clearly - but that's all it would take for Keller to become Nix's hero.

That's the day Keller, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Wasilla, saved the life of her 5-year-old daughter, Taylia Hardy.

"I couldn't breathe, I was hyperventilating," Nix said about what she remembered after her daughter was pulled, blue and unresponsive, from a hotel hot tub. "I can't tell you, it's the worst thing ever, ever. I kept thinking, ‘This is how it feels to lose a baby.' I started praying. I couldn't even cry, and I remember thinking how fast this was going by."

It was coincidence that brought Keller and Nix to the Quality Inn hotel in Kenai that day. Keller was visiting a friend and Nix, also from Wasilla, was on the road attending a football game for her 9-year-old son. Before checking out, little Taylia went to the pool with a family friend and her son for a last swim.

"My friend took her son and my daughter swimming, and just as I was standing up (from breakfast) people started yelling, ‘There's a baby drowning!'" Nix said. "I have a handicap, so I can't move very well, but I was trying to get there fast. By the time I got there, my friend had pulled her out of the hot tub."

99-year-old Ham operator still tuned in

WASILLA - When Arlene "Buddy" Clay says she spends every night on the "net," she doesn't mean the Internet.

She was 32 and World War II was raging when she came to Alaska in 1944 with her husband, Earl, to work with the Civil Aeronautics Administration in Nome.

After serving their two-year commitment, the two moved to a new post at Aniak where they served another two-year term with the CAA, a predecessor to the Federal Aviation Administration.

But the young couple liked living with in the Yup'ik village along the shores of the Kuskokwim River and stayed for a third year, she said.

The Clays retired from the CAA, but had grown to love the land, the food and the people in Aniak.

"We liked Aniak and decided to stay for a while, not realizing we'd stay forever," Clay said Saturday at the Mat-Su Public Safety Building in Wasilla.

She lived in the cabin they built three miles from Aniak overlooking the Kuskokwim River for 67 years - before health issues forced her to move into the Primrose Retirement Community in January.

Now 99, Buddy - as her friends know her - is the only Ham radio operator at the Wasilla retirement community.

"That's the reason I decided to come to Primrose, because they let me have my radio with me," she said.

Earl had a Ham radio license when the couple moved to Alaska. On the East Coast he was W1NOP. In Alaska, he was known as KL7EM and Buddy has been KL7OT since she earned her license in 1948.

Drug case thrown out

PALMER - Citing flaws in the way the search was conducted and directing relatively harsh words at one of the officers involved, a judge has thrown out criminal charges against a marijuana grower.

Superior Court Judge Gregory Heath ruled Nov. 8 that the warrant obtained to search the home of Robin Kling and Samantha Clymer was invalid, as was all the evidence taken away after the search. Since that left prosecutors with very little, if any, evidence, he threw the case out.

One of two defense attorneys in the case, Kling's attorney Josh Fannon, said he believes the case raises some troubling issues about how police work is handled, especially in drug cases.

"People are going to come back and say, ‘Oh great, you got this drug grower off on a technicality," Fannon said.

But that misses the point, he said. Police shouldn't be allowed to get away with the kind of work they did in this case, Fannon said, before paraphrasing Ben Franklin's famous quote: "People who are willing to give up a little liberty for a little order aren't going to get any liberty or any order, and they deserve neither."

Heath's reasoning has to do with the different types of informants in criminal cases. In this case, it has to do with the distinction between police informants and citizen informants.

Essentially, citizen informants are people concerned for their own or the community's safety. Police informants have other motives. They may be hoping for leniency in their own criminal cases. They may be getting paid to give tips. Or, they may be seeking revenge.

In this case, Heath wrote, it was the latter.

The tip in this case came from King's brother, Jeffrey Laplant, who had initially summoned Alaska State Troopers on Sept. 16, 2010, because, he said, Kling pointed a gun at him and told him to leave when he stopped by to pick up some tools. In reporting that, he also reported the marijuana grow.

An hour after the tip, troopers showed up at Kling's house and talked to him.

Shoppers ‘swing' into season at Wal-Mart

WASILLA - Black Friday took a swing toward Boxing Day at Wal-Mart when a scuffle broke out between two men over a $60 ping-pong table.

Wasilla Wal-Mart manager Terry Voorhees said that, overall, Black Friday was very successful and the ping-pong table incident was more a case of a few bad apples than anything.

"Wasilla police were called and both parties left the store," he said. "It was very peacefully taken care of."

Facebook posts to the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman page allege shoppers at the store Friday also scuffled over vacuums and food storage containers.

Voorhees said the store had sales starting at 10 p.m., midnight and 8 a.m., which helped to spread out shoppers.

"I think we had everyone in Wasilla here," he said. "People get excited about Christmas shopping. It was a good event."

DECEMBER

Details emerge in Big Lake shooting

BIG LAKE - A scuffle in the middle of a local side road Friday sparked a shooting that killed a man and landed another in jail.

The details of what Christoffer Inman, 26, and Larry Mayo, 53, of Houston, were arguing over are unclear in an affidavit Alaska State Trooper David Bower filed in court Saturday. But Bower did shed some light on the events leading up to Inman's death.

He writes that Wyatt Metro, who was driving the car with Inman as a passenger, called to report the shooting at 11:05 p.m. Metro was calling from the intersection of Victor Road and Tom Parker's Way. The former runs along the eastern shore of Beaver Lake, the later connects to Hawk Lane, which in turn connects with the Parks Highway and Big Lake Road.

According to Bower, Metro said Inman had been shot in the chest. He brought Inman to the Big Lake Tesoro to meet medics.

AST: Man charged with molesting 2 generations

Editor's note: There are two men in the Big Lake area with similar names. The man involved in this case is not Harold L. Johnson, who also is known as H. Leonard Johnson.

PALMER - A Big Lake man is facing a dozen serious felonies after allegations surfaced that he sexually abused two generations of Mat-Su Valley girls. According to an affidavit Alaska State Trooper investigator Toma Caldarea filed at the Palmer Courthouse, the most recent allegations against Lenard Johnson, 54, came to light in June when a 7-year-old girl alleged Johnson had been sexually assaulting her.

Caldarea sat down for an interview with the girl who told the story from the beginning about how she'd been taking pictures of her friends at daycare and told them all about where babies come from and how that happens.

She told Caldarea that she learned all this from Johnson. She described for the trooper exactly what Johnson had done with her in a bedroom at a Big Lake home. In Caldarea's retelling of her story, the acts clearly amount to sex. The girl told the trooper it had happened a dozen times, then specified that a dozen means 12. Caldarea wrote that he was able to determine it had happened from December 2010 to June 2011.

Search at pumper's premises produces pot

HOUSTON - A septic pumper and erstwhile city council candidate arrested last week for allegedly threatening to shoot troopers was apparently also growing weed.

According to a filing in federal court - where he has not yet been charged with a crime - Kenny Champ first came to the notice of authorities on Sept. 26.

Alaska State Troopers went out to his property to investigate complaints he was dumping raw sewage into a creek off Bench Lake Drive. Champ shut the door on troopers and allegedly then dialed 911 to tell dispatchers he had a gun and was going to shoot. Troopers retreated. Four days later, though, investigators with the state Department of Environmental Conservation paid a visit to the property.

"Oct. 5, 2011, a laboratory analysis by (a laboratory) disclosed the fecal coliform concentration were over safe limits and were indicative of illegal sewage dumping," according to a sworn statement Trooper Vance Peronto filed in federal court. "Witnesses also reported smelling a foul odor of both sewage and a chemical, bleach-type odor."

On Dec. 6, troopers filed for a search warrant. On Dec. 7, they served it.

"Pursuant to the service of the aforementioned search warrant, investigators discovered a commercial marijuana grow operation inside an outbuilding located on the property listed above," Peronto wrote.

Troopers amended the search warrant to include the grow in addition to the evidence of illegal dumping.

The grow was sizeable by local standards, containing 1,700 rooted plants. Troopers say inside Champ's home they found processed marijuana, a scale, five guns, and $18,000 cash. When he was arrested, Champ had $2,000 more in his wallet.