A warning to readers: this story contains descriptions of death that some readers may find disturbing.
According to Bethel police, little is known about what happened in the hours leading up to the death of 29-year-old Naomi Larson. She was found alone in a local home on Aug. 5, face down in a hallway with a blanket covering the upper half of her body.
The Bethel Police Department has said that there is no immediate indication of foul play, but friends and family members believe that there’s more to the story. Larson’s family held a funeral in mid-August in her home village of Nunapitchuk. Her mother, Sophia Larson, said that her daughter’s face had signs of physical trauma.
“When her body arrived, she looked visibly beaten because her face was swollen and her eyes were slightly open,” Larson said. “She had, like, some kind of stabbing on her forehead. There was physically a cut, like an ‘X’ mark or something.”
But according to an email from Bethel police, Larson’s body showed “no sign of trauma of any kind” when she was discovered at a home she was staying at in Bethel’s Housing subdivision.
According to the police report, officers responded to the home after receiving a 911 call requesting a welfare check. Officers that arrived just before 2 p.m. on Aug. 5 found the front door locked, but were let in by a property manager. The investigating officer immediately noticed blood pooling in Larson’s legs, which according to the National Institutes of Health, appears beginning between a half hour to two hours after death.
The police report says nothing about an estimated time of death, but department staff said by email that rigor mortis was not present, and that all indications showed that Larson had been deceased for a “short amount of time.”
The police report says that a man arrived at the house while officers were still on scene. The man told officers he had known Larson for around a month, and had been with her the previous night.
According to the report, he told officers he called a cab to go to his job at around 9 a.m. that morning, and that Larson locked the door behind him when he left. The report does not say at what time the man returned to the residence, or whether he was questioned by police about the circumstances of Larson’s death, including the blanket found over the upper half of her body.
According to the report, the woman who initially called 911 told officers that she had made three separate visits to the house on Aug. 5, believing her lost cell phone might be inside. She told officers she called 911 after Larson did not respond to her attempts to wake her up. She said that she had last seen Larson three to four days earlier, and that she knew of three people who had been at the house several days before Larson’s death.
Larson’s close friend Trisha White, who said that she was in an on-and-off relationship with Larson at the time of her death, said that she believes there were more people coming and going from the house.
“The last time I talked with Naomi was a few days before they found her. (…) This is what she said: ‘Babe, you should come get me. I’m scared,’” White said. “And there’s lots of drunk people in the background and I can mostly hear men. (…) Before I even asked her what the address was, somebody grabbed the phone and hung up.”
White said that she believes that call came from the residence where Larson’s body was found. White also attended Larson’s funeral in Nunapitchuk and echoed Larson’s mother’s concerns about her physical condition.
“Those bruises, and the cut on her forehead, and her eyes being red, and her neck being swollen, she didn’t look like that the days before she, before they found her,” White said.
The police report does not say whether officers questioned any of the neighbors at the time about what they may have seen prior to the discovery of Larson’s body. White herself said that as of Thursday, police had not reached out to her for more information, despite multiple attempts to share what she knows.
According to the police report, both the woman who called 911 and the man interviewed at the scene agreed to come to the police station to be interviewed more thoroughly. But only a statement from the woman is included in the police report.
The Bethel Police Department declined to comment on whether the man’s statement is absent from the report because he invoked his right to remain silent.
Prior to interviewing the man and woman at the police station, Bethel police officers searched the residence where Larson’s body was found and seized several items as evidence, including a “small blue pill appearing to be made from home.” The report says that the pill was sent to a crime lab for analysis.
Autopsy results from the state medical examiner are expected to be released in the coming weeks. Sophia, Larson’s mother, said that it has been painful to wonder what happened to her daughter, and to see so much speculation on social media.
“I feel like we need closure for this to help us move on,” Sophia said.
On Sept. 19, police wrote in an email that the department will determine whether the investigation is complete depending on the findings of the autopsy.
