Was a police shooting of an Anchorage teen justified? Anchorage’s police chief says yes, special prosecutors agree

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - One day after the police officer who shot and killed a 16-year-old Anchorage girl was cleared by investigating prosecutors, Alaska’s News Source spoke with Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case on his view of the matter.

Content Warning: This article and related video contains details that some readers might find disturbing.

This year, there have been five deadly shootings by APD officers and eight officer-involved shootings in Anchorage overall.

Anchorage Police responded to a 911 call after one of Easter Leafa’s sisters called them reporting that Easter had a knife.

The sister reported to police that “Easter Leafa, was mad and trying to stab her with a knife because V.L. had not done what Easter Leafa wanted,” according to the summary.

The family calmly answers the door when police arrive and let them in the house. Police say they are unsure if Easter is inside the house.

At the time, she was on the balcony, facing away from the officers and wrapped in a blue blanket.

Inside the two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment are 10 people, including two grandchildren.

The family has consistently said Easter wasn’t fluent in English after moving to Alaska in the spring from American Samoa to join an extended family network of aunts, cousins, sisters and uncles living in Anchorage.

The Department of Law’s Office of Special Prosecutions report does not mention language as a possible barrier during the encounter.

“Obviously the video shows that there’s different language that’s being spoken among family members, but the communication that the officers had at the time, with people that they were talking to, appeared to be very clear communication, and nobody at any time indicated that any of the people that we were trying to communicate with had any challenges with hearing, understanding English,” Case said Tuesday morning during an interview at Anchorage Police headquarters.

The report also says the family continued to ask to speak with Easter, but were denied, and wouldn’t go inside the two bedrooms of the small apartment.

Asked if stressful scenes — with lots of people in crowded apartments — are an unusual situation for police, Case said no.

“We see that frequently,” Case said.

So, what made this situation different from a scene police typically encounter on any given call?

”I don’t think that it was different from the standpoint of we have to navigate, you know, the environment that we’re in. I think the difference is when the officers had contact, that they had to work with that confined space, as well as the threat of somebody having a knife and walking towards them. And, so, that’s what makes this different, from you know, a lot of the different calls that we’ve handled in those similar circumstances, in terms of domestic disputes and confined spaces,” Case said.

Case was also asked if he felt the shooting was justified.

“I think that the Office of Special Prosecutions’ analysis of the incident, I mean that’s what they do, and so I’m not in the business of telling them [they] didn’t do their job properly, and you know, their review obviously was — it was within, that it was justified and I agree with that assessment,” Case said.

Another question was the small amount of time police were inside the apartment before Easter was shot and why police opened a sliding glass door to speak with Easter instead of allowing for more time for additional officers to arrive to help move family members.

When officers shot and killed 58-year-old Lisa Fordyce-Blair earlier this summer, the SWAT team had spent hours with her before the shooting.

At 4:39 p.m. on June 19, 2024, Anchorage Police responded to a disturbance with a weapon after Fordyce-Blair’s neighbors called police.

An updated police report shows an officer-involved shooting investigation at 2 a.m. on June 20.

So why was there a need to engage with Easter when in a separate police shooting the person was given hours to respond?

“I think part of the problem on waiting, I mean, we get these types or similar types of domestic violence calls on a regular basis. And, so, anytime there’s some level of threat, automatically going to a — let’s go to like a SWAT type of a call out — that’s not a reasonable response. SWAT callouts, in and of themselves, are considered a use of force by the court. And I’m sure if you’ve — if you’ve kind of looked at the at the way SWAT teams are used throughout the country over the last decade, you know, the goal is to reduce that level of response, because, you know, we show up with a lot of gear, a lot of equipment, and that, in and of itself, can cause escalation, and so we have to balance whether that escalation is going to be appropriate because it rises to that level or use different means to actually try de-escalate the situation,” Case said.

Case said there has been an increase in violence, drugs and mental health problems in Anchorage, but APD hasn’t yet provided Alaska’s News Source with stats to support the statement.

Case also said APD is down to 60 officers and there are only five people on the mental health crisis team. He said tripling that number would be ideal.

“I always say that I could triple the size of that unit and still have work for them to do,” Case said.

The next phase is an administrative investigation.

“As the public’s aware, we are going to have an outside investigator conduct the internal investigation, and that’s going to primarily be looking at policies within the police department,” Case said. “Those are traditional two phases that we do, the criminal and the administrative, and what we’re adding to that process is kind of a third phase, or a third layer, where we look at the balance between policy training and performance, and it’s in that phase where we really talk about specifically the decisions that were made that could have been made differently, that may not be a violation of policy, but could potentially impact outcomes of these types of incidents moving forward.

“So that’s really kind of my focus is, how do we balance or review what our training is, how our policies are applied, and how the field performance is, even if it’s — it may be outside of the administrative and the criminal.”

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