5 days ago
'Badly mishandled': In scathing order, judge dismisses Metlakatla murder charge because of faulty police investigation
Jun. 6—A Ketchikan judge dismissed a murder charge against a Metlakatla man accused of fatally shooting his brother, saying the local police department badly botched the investigation and then lied about it in court, and the prosecution failed to correct the errors, dooming the prospect of a fair trial.
The only appropriate remedy, wrote Ketchikan Superior Court Judge Daniel Doty in an order released May 27, is to dismiss with prejudice the murder charge against Isaac Henderson in the death of his brother, effective Friday. A dismissal with prejudice means the case is permanently over.
"The state has badly mishandled this case," the judge wrote.
The dismissal — meaning the case could not be retried — represents a stunning rebuke for prosecutors and police in a high-profile homicide case in Alaska's only tribal reservation, and revealed the depth of dysfunction in the community's local police department.
Bruce Janes, the longtime police chief in Metlakatla, was fired after the judge's findings. Janes could not be reached for comment.
The Alaska Department of Law said it had advised the Metlakatla Police Department that it would need to make "substantial reforms" before the state would "continue to prosecute cases referred by their agency," wrote Angie Kemp, the director of the department's criminal division, in a statement emailed to the Daily News on Friday.
The state Office of Special Prosecutions will assume responsibility for prosecuting active cases from Metlakatla and will assist the community "working toward successful reform," Kemp wrote.
Metlakatla Mayor Albert Smith told the Ketchikan Daily News that he was "shocked" by the findings about the department, and had "initiated an immediate change in leadership."
Smith did not respond to a request by the ADN for comment.
On Friday, prosecutors filed a motion asking the court to reconsider whether the "drastic, litigation ending sanction of dismissal is warranted" and offering a point-by-point defense of contentious evidence issues. The order asks the court to hold off on the dismissal until the motion has been considered.
The charge stemmed from the 2021 death of Tyler Henderson, a Metlakatla man who was profiled in the documentary "Alaska Nets," about a championship high school basketball team in the Southeast Alaska community.
At the time, prosecutors said that Isaac Henderson had shot his brother in the head during an argument at their home in Metlakatla on Dec. 5, 2021, with several other people in the house at the time. A grand jury indicted Isaac Henderson on murder charges.
The case dragged on without resolution for more than three years and was reassigned five times to different defense attorneys but was headed for a 2025 trial, the judge's order said.
According to the order, it wasn't until a pre-trial hearing in May that it became clear the prosecution had not turned over evidence to defense attorneys that could have bolstered Henderson's claim of self-defense and his contention that the gun may have been actually fired by another man in the house, who'd been grappling with him to get it out of his hands.
Prosecutors are required to hand over potentially exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys in criminal cases, a process known as discovery.
Testimony at a hearing also showed that the initial police investigation had been incomplete, with the first responding officer admitting that he'd faked evidence logging forms and had failed to take witness statements at the scene.
Janes — who had worked for the Metlakatla Police Department for 31 years and had been chief for eight years — admitted that the department's practice was to routinely fake evidence logging forms, raising the judge's concerns about evidence handling and chain of custody, according to the order.
The investigation of Henderson's death was "very sloppy" and "probably the worst I've ever done," Janes testified, according to the filing.
Doty, the judge, called the police department's lack of standard evidence handling procedure "extraordinary."
The judge described a second hearing in May as "shocking." He concluded that the police chief had repeatedly lied about evidence and procedures, including about a piece of a ceiling tile.
Janes admitted to lying in grand jury testimony that a ceiling tile from the trailer had been collected and taken to the crime lab for examination.
"The Chief stated that his sworn grand jury testimony was false and that police did not actually collect the tile," the judge wrote. Because of the generally chaotic and fault evidence logging, the court, he said, "cannot determine what happened to the ceiling tile."
"The Metlakatla Police Department has designed discovery policies that guaranteed evidence would be lost, destroyed, or overlooked," Doty wrote. "The (police) did all those things here, and compounded its errors by repeatedly misrepresenting facts about discovery. And the prosecutor's office, which inexplicably continued to accept the Department's representations and relay those representations to the Court, failed to correct those errors."
"It is important to know that what happened in this case is extremely rare," wrote Kemp, of the Department of Law. "The dismissal of a case for these reasons, any case, is extraordinary. It's made more tragic given the nature of the case."
In a statement to the court, Naomi Leask, a longtime local cultural educator in Metlakatla and the mother of both Isaac and Tyler Henderson, wrote that the case had devastated her family.
The recent revelations about the weakness of the police investigation had been hard to process, she wrote.
"The sheer amount of information that I have only received within the last few months has been incredibly hard to process because I have felt everything from grief, anger, to relief," Leask wrote.
While mourning one son, she'd also been enduring the murder charge against another son, she wrote. Isaac Henderson had lost his membership in the Metlakatla Indian Community, and the family had decided to leave their home.
"I've made the incredibly tough decision to relocate my family once this all settles," she wrote. "I'm not even 100% sure where to go because I don't even know where home is anymore."
