Anchorage officer’s fatal shooting of teenager was ‘legally justified,’ state says

State prosecutors will not bring charges against an Anchorage police officer who shot and killed a teenager in August.

In a report released Monday, officials with the state Office of Special Prosecutions wrote that officer Alexander Roman was legally justified in fatally shooting 16-year-old Easter Leafa. Roman was one of the officers who went to Leafa’s home on Aug. 13 after a family member called 911 and said Leafa was threatening others with a knife. 

The Anchorage Police Department released video footage of the shooting on Monday afternoon. 

Since 2010, more than 150 people have been killed by police across the state, and none of the officers involved have been charged with a crime. 

‘I don’t want to hurt you’

The state’s 22-page report and the body camera footage show in detail, for the first time, what happened on Aug. 13.

According to the report, officers responded to a 911 call around 11:30 p.m. The caller, Leafa’s sister, said Leafa was “acting up over some stupid shit” and had threatened her with a knife that the family used to cut vegetables.

“She’s only 16,” Leafa’s sister told a dispatcher in the footage. 

Roman and another officer arrived minutes later, according to the state’s report. Video footage shows officers walking to the second floor of the apartment building Leafa lived in, their firearms drawn as Leafa’s family members answer the door. The officers were told Leafa was on a balcony, and they asked family members to move to a different room as they moved to confront her. In total, there were 10 people in the apartment.  

“If we have a confrontation, I don’t want to deal with you and her,” an officer told family members in the footage. 

“She’s not going to do anything,” a family member said in response.

“I don’t know what she’s going to do, and neither do you,” the officer replied. 

Officers called for backup to serve as “crowd control” as they moved family members to another room. In the footage, family members switched between speaking English and Samoan. 

“Are you guys going to point that to her?” one of the family members said, in reference to the officer’s firearm. 

“If she comes at us with a knife? Yes,” the officer responded.

Once officers had moved Leafa’s family to a bedroom, they opened the screen door to the balcony, where Leafa was seated. Her back was to the officer and a blanket covered her body. Officer Roman made repeated attempts for Leafa to show “open, empty hands.” 

“Your non-compliance could result in injury,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. We have lethal, we have less lethal options.”

Leafa stood up, wiped her eyes with the blanket and slowly began walking to officers with the knife in her hand, the state report says. Three officers shouted at her to drop the knife. As she took one step inside the apartment, officers opened fire, prompting screams from the family. It was determined in the report that Roman fired his sidearm, while another officer, Officer Pherson, fired a 40mm less-than-lethal round.

Officers performed lifesaving measures on Leafa, and she was taken to a hospital, where she was declared dead. 

‘These are challenging days for our community’

Leafa’s death was met with widespread community outrage and remorse. 

In interviews, her family had noted that they never expected police to respond and shoot Leafa. 

Hundreds gathered at various vigils held in memory of Leafa, including Polynesian Association of Alaska President Lucy Hansen.

“Our young kids are very afraid now to the point that if they call the police, are they going to come?” Hansen said at a downtown vigil. “Are they going to come and save them, or they’re going to come and kill them?”

Leafa and her family had just moved to Anchorage several months before she was killed by police. She was set to start her junior year at Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School the week she died. 

An attorney for the Leafa family did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. 

Shortly after Leafa’s killing, Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance announced a series of police reforms, including the creation of a citizen police review board, a review of the training officers undergo during the police academy and a review of the last 15 years of police shootings. Plus, she said, a third party will conduct an internal review of the shooting instead of the police department doing the review itself.

“These are challenging days for our community,” LaFrance said in a statement Tuesday. “The way to work through our challenges is to do it together. Since August 13, I have been listening — to the family of Easter Leafa, to residents of different backgrounds and cultures, and to the APD officers who work to protect our city. What I have heard, universally, is that we all want Anchorage to be a place where everyone feels safe.”  

‘Fully utilize the training we give them’

With the state part of the investigation over, it now moves to the administrative phase. While typically, that review is done by APD’s internal affairs unit, this one is being reviewed by a third-party. 

“I think that’s building public trust,” Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case said in an interview Tuesday morning. “You know, this particular case, there’s a lot of emotion in the community, as you’re well aware, and we want to communicate to our community that we are committed to honest, open and continuous communication. And part of that is having an outside investigator look at this particular case, which is very, very unusual, to have an internal investigation be conducted externally.”

Case said the investigation could yield one of four outcomes. The first is that there were no policy violations, while the second could be that there were. Case said the third would be that the investigator would “exonerate” policy violations.

“In other words, there were policy violations that occurred, but there are reasonable justifications as to why that happened,” Case said.

He said the fourth outcome could be that there’s not enough evidence to determine if policies were violated. 

Case said he hasn’t yet discussed s the shooting with the officers involved, since it was part of a criminal investigation. He said the administrative review is different from the review done by the state, which focused on whether state law was broken.

“The officer is answering questions narrowly tailored to whether or not the conduct is criminal, and we get to widen that scope of questions that we ask the officer in the administrative investigation,” Case said.

Under state statute, deadly use of force is authorized for officers when they reasonably suspect a person has committed a felony use of force against someone, is attempting to escape while armed with a firearm, or might “otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”

Case declined Tuesday to speak to the specifics of the Leafa shooting ahead of the internal investigation. But he spoke broadly about the department’s de-escalation tactics. He said officers have gone through de-escalation training since he began at the department over two decades ago, but a big focus needs to be on better preparing officers to respond to multiple calls. 

“In our training and in the care that we give our officers, we have to use that time between calls to make sure that they’re prepared to go into the next call and fully utilize the training that we give them,” Case said. 

Case emphasized that officers often encounter “fear and short decision making” when responding to calls. 

“All of that training kind of comes into play in that very, very short, compressed time,” Case said. “And it’s a situation that no officer wants to be involved in, and it’s unfortunate when the officers are in those situations.”

Case also noted that the department has made investments in recent years to better support officers’ mental health, including adding mental health clinicians. 

While Case said he understands the frustration from the community in a year where five people have been killed by police, he also spoke highly of his officers’ dedication to their jobs. He said that just in the second quarter of this year, they’d responded to over 53,000 calls. 

“I understand as a chief that some of those emotions, those feelings, exist, but I also get to see the great work the officers get to do every single day,” Case said. “It’s my job to explain that and show that to the public so that they can continue to gain the confidence that they may have lost over these recent incidents.”