Story by KNBA's Rhonda McBride
Anchorage Police say they are in the final stages of its investigation into the death of Kelly Hunt, the 19-year-old Shaktoolik student who disappeared in January on her way to college in Soldotna. Last month, Hunt’s remains were found in a ravine in Spenard, the same Anchorage neighborhood where she had been staying with a friend.
Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case says the medical examiner’s preliminary report determined Hunt died from hypothermia and exposure, with alcohol in her system.
“There’s no indication that there’s physical trauma. There’s no indication that an assault has occurred,” Case said. “So, most of those questions — on whether or not there was a homicide — those questions have been answered through the medical examiner’s process.”
Case said Hunt was missing for more than 100 days, and prolonged exposure to the elements makes it nearly impossible to determine Hunt’s exact time of death.
Before closing out the investigation, police plan to conduct follow-up interviews to better understand the circumstances leading up to her death. Depending on what they learn, Case says the investigation could shift back towards a criminal case. But for now, there is no evidence of foul play.
“The fact that we had a 19-year-old die of exposure, that's a tragic situation, and I would anticipate anyone who hears the story would think it's tragic and unfortunate, and have a lot of emotion behind that,” Case said, “but the fact that somebody leaves a residence in the middle of the night to potentially go meet up with somebody, I'm not sure that decision, in and of itself, is suspicious.”
Hunt was supposed to catch a bus from Anchorage to attend the Alaska Christian College in Soldotna. Her friends told police she left on the morning of January 7 to meet with someone to buy alcohol and had left her purse and suitcase behind. Case says the investigation was further complicated, because her disappearance wasn’t reported until four days later. But despite that, Case believes his police officers and detectives did what they could.
“When you start four days behind, when somebody goes missing, you're pretty limited in that immediate response, but we did the things we were supposed to do,” Case said.
But advocates for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, including Antonia Commack, question police handling of the case. She says investigators are drawing conclusions too soon, without first questioning the people who last saw Hunt.
“How are you going to make that determination before you speak to those people,” Commack said. “Because the bottom line is, she is not old enough to drink herself. Somebody furnished her alcohol, and she wound up dead. That should be a crime.”
“I honestly feel like they're just doubling down, making it seem like they did a good job — throwing out excuses, while ignoring the things that they didn't do,” said Commack, who has been critical of the police department’s delay in listing Hunt’s name in national missing person databases. She also said police should have begun searching the neighborhood immediately with dogs trained to pick up the scent of human remains.
Case said the department doesn’t own its own team of recovery dogs. Instead, they belong to volunteers and are used selectively. He said the circumstances surrounding Hunt’s disappearance did not call for their use.
The Anchorage Police Department timed today’s report on the Kelly Hunt case with the launch of a new online dashboard that tracks missing persons in Anchorage and the department’s homicide clearance rate. Case says the report confirms that Alaska Natives make up a disproportionate share of both missing persons and homicides — but says cases involving both Native and non-Native victims are solved at about the same rate.
