XPost: alt.native, alt.politics.democrats, sac.politics   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: democrat.killers@spectrum.net   
      
   On 24 Oct 2019, the late Mark Wieber   
    posted some   
   news:4RmsF.66138$HU2.38396@fx26.iad:   
      
   > Democrats get away with everything including abusing and killing   
   > women.  Stupid women still buy into their shit and keep them   
   > empowered.   
      
   Before they died, Jennifer Kirk and Sue Sue Norton were both victims of   
   domestic violence, but the men involved — the ex-mayor’s sons — faced   
   few consequences despite a long history of similar allegations.   
      
   This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local   
   Reporting Network.   
      
   Note to readers: This story details allegations of violence against   
   women and girls.   
      
   KOTZEBUE — On a subzero Monday morning in March 2020, police found   
   another woman dead at the ex-mayor’s property.   
      
   Two years earlier, the body of 25-year-old Jennifer Kirk lay curled at   
   the foot of a bed, a rifle on the floor, strangulation marks on her neck   
   and a bullet hole beneath her chin. City police swiftly closed the case,   
   declaring it a suicide.   
      
   Now police were back at the property, where the lifeless body of Susanna   
   “Sue Sue” Norton, 30, was discovered in an adjacent house, beaten and   
   strangled. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide.   
      
   Kirk and Norton, both Inupiaq, had each dated sons of the former borough   
   mayor, and the sons had previously been convicted of beating each of   
   them. One of the sons had admitted to strangling Kirk twice before.   
   Another pleaded guilty to kicking Norton in the stomach when she was six   
   months pregnant.   
      
   No one has ever been charged with a crime in connection to the deaths.   
      
   In a state where women are 2.5 times more likely than the national   
   average to be killed by a man and Alaska Native women are especially at   
   risk, elected leaders here have repeatedly pledged action. The   
   Department of Justice declared a rural law enforcement emergency in   
   Alaska following a 2019 report by the Anchorage Daily News and   
   ProPublica on glaring lapses in local policing. Two years later, the   
   governor created a state council on Missing and Murdered Indigenous   
   Persons, and in 2022, new investigators were hired to solve cases like   
   Norton’s.   
      
   Unexplained holes in the investigations into the deaths of Kirk and   
   Norton call into question this commitment, a review by the Anchorage   
   Daily News and ProPublica found. More than that, the events leading up   
   to the women’s deaths illustrate how police, prosecutors and judges here   
   have regularly given pass after pass to people accused of domestic   
   violence and strangulation.   
      
   Police records obtained by the newsrooms show that Kirk’s body revealed   
   signs of strangulation. Her boyfriend, Anthony Richards, son of   
   then-Mayor Clement Richards Sr., admitted to police that he had caused   
   the marks on the day she died. After reviewing the records, former   
   Kotzebue Police Chief Ed Ward said the 10 red flags that the Training   
   Institute on Strangulation Prevention instructs police to look for in   
   cases of domestic violence killings all appeared to apply to the scene   
   of Kirk’s death. (Ward did not work at the police department at the time   
   of her death.)   
      
   Yet the Kotzebue Police Department closed the case after a single day of   
   investigation, labeling it a suicide before receiving the final autopsy   
   report.   
      
   In Norton’s case, police never told her family she had been strangled,   
   family members said. Police didn’t ask the public to help catch the   
   suspect, as they had the prior year when a fire department dog was   
   killed in the same neighborhood. They never interviewed key witnesses   
   and failed to obtain a search warrant, leaving evidence uncollected.   
      
   State troopers, who took over the investigation into Norton’s death in   
   2022, told her family they planned to travel to Kotzebue over the summer   
   to investigate further. Norton’s family says that didn’t happen either.   
   (A department spokesperson said on Oct. 27 that investigators had not   
   yet visited Kotzebue for the case but planned to do so before the end of   
   the year. He said the agency’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons   
   unit is “taking investigative steps with the goal of finding the person   
   responsible for Sue Sue’s tragic death and holding that person   
   responsible for their actions through the criminal justice system.”)   
      
   Both Kirk and Norton had been victims of domestic violence at the hands   
   of two of the Richards brothers. The Daily News and ProPublica found   
   that state prosecutors repeatedly allowed the men to avoid felony   
   domestic violence convictions for strangling or beating women, including   
   Kirk and Norton. In those cases, the state offered the sons deals,   
   allowing them to plead guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges such as   
   “harassment” and receive slaps on the wrist, not prison sentences.   
      
   • • •   
      
   Anchorage Daily News · “Fine Third Parties”   
   Listen to state Superior Court Judge Paul Roetman describe Annette   
   Richards and Clement Richards Sr. as “fine third parties” in a 2015 bail   
   hearing for their son Anthony Richards, who was facing sexual assault   
   charges. (Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica)   
      
   • • •   
   In one sexual assault case involving a different woman, state Superior   
   Court Judge Paul Roetman granted Anthony Richards, the mayor’s youngest   
   son, uncommonly low bail. Roetman explained his decision by saying he   
   had worked with Anthony’s mother and knew his father held elected   
   office.   
      
   Roetman and two prosecutors, now a magistrate and judge, declined to   
   comment through a court system spokesperson. “Judicial officers cannot   
   and do not comment on their cases, in order to maintain the integrity of   
   their decisions and to ensure that, for fairness reasons, their thinking   
   is reflected solely in the official court record without extraneous   
   commentary,” the spokesperson wrote.   
      
   In the center of Kotzebue, Norton’s adoptive mother, Susanna “Mama Sue”   
   Norton, is waiting for answers from Alaska’s criminal justice system.   
   She lives three doors down from the house where her daughter was found   
   strangled to death.   
      
   “My family is not going to have peace until they know that they found   
   someone that did this to her,” she said in an interview in 2020. Three   
   years later, as another winter begins, the case grows colder by the day.   
      
   A history of criminal charges   
   Kotzebue lies just above the Arctic Circle on a frying-pan-shaped   
   peninsula, nearer to Russia than to Anchorage. Clement Richards Sr. was   
   born here in 1961, two years after Alaska became a state. The city sold   
   itself back then as the Polar Bear Capital of the World, where small   
   planes carrying trophy hunters from across the globe parked on the sea   
   ice. (One of the largest polar bears ever recorded was hunted here in   
   1963.)   
      
   In the 1970s, geologists confirmed what a local bush pilot long   
   suspected: The red-stained creeks that veined the tundra hinted at a   
   massive mineral deposit. In the ‘80s, Kotzebue and surrounding villages   
      
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