Rural Alaska blog: The Village : UPDATE: One arrested after police car stolen in Bethel, taken for ride along frozen river

Rural blog

The Village is a Daily News blog about life and politics in rural Alaska. Its main author is ADN reporter Kyle Hopkins. Come here for breaking news on village issues, plus interviews, videos and photos. But that's just part of the story. We want to feature your pictures, videos and stories, too. Think of The Village as your bulletin board. E-mail us anything you’d like to share with the rest of Alaska -- your letters to the editor, the photos of your latest hunt or video of your latest potlatch. (We love video.)

Contributor

Kyle Hopkins

I was born in Sitka, have lived in Kake, Skagway and Fairbanks and joined the ADN in 2005 after writing for the Anchorage Press and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I started blogging for the paper in 2006 with The Trail, our blog about the governor's race. Then came the Alaska Politics blog. Now I'm covering government and rural affairs and live in Anchorage with my wife, Rebecca. (Update: Our daughter Alice was born May 31. Thanks everyone for the suggestions.) E-mail me at khopkins@adn.com and find me on Twitter at twitter.com/ADNVillage.

khopkins@adn.com

Features

SECTION

2011 AFN

Follow the progress and see the scenes from this year's Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage.

Photos: 2011 AFN opens

Photos: Quyana Alaska performances

PHOTOS

2011 WEIO

The World Eskimo Indian Olympics took place at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks.

PHOTOS

Summer in Barrow

Take a photo tour of the northernmost U.S. city during the summer when the sun is out almost the entire day.

READER-SUBMITTED PHOTOS

Life in Rural Alaska (PT 2)

Post your photos from the Bush and check out what others are sending in.

Post a photo from Rural Alaska

Reader photos: Life in Rural Alaska (PT 1)

UPDATE: One arrested after police car stolen in Bethel, taken for ride along frozen river

Posted by thevillage

Anchorage Daily News

Posted: December 9, 2009 - 10:54 am

UPDATE (1:25 p.m.): Bethel police say they've arrested a 24-year-old man for stealing a police car last night in Bethel and taking it for a joyride along the frozen Kuskokwim River.

Charles Chaney Jr. is charged with first-degree vehicle theft, said Bethel police chief Larry Elarton.

He was caught after a village police officer in nearby Napakiak saw him with a police radar gun strapped to the front of a four-wheeler, police say.

Chaney stole a 1998 Ford Expedition from a Bethel police officer while the officer was interviewing someone at about 6 p.m. last night, Elarton said.

The keys were in the police SUV at the time. The officer wasn't sure if he locked the doors or not, the chief said.

More charges against Chaney and others -- police found him at a Bethel apartment about three hours after the theft -- are pending, Elarton said. "The officer's police gloves were sitting in the kitchen."

At the time of the theft, Chaney was out on bail for another offense, he said.

The car was found about 10 miles from Bethel, still on the river ice. But the semi-automatic police rifle that police believe the thief or thieves were firing along the river is still missing.

Elarton described the Kuskokwim as "lightly frozen." Vehicle traffic slowed on the river after a string of beautiful days in Bethel, he said. “We have open water in some places down there. The lieutenant and I were down in our pickup last night and it wasn’t enjoyable.”

The Drums has much more on the story:

Suspects who stole a Bethel police car and took it on a wild ride along the frozen Kuskokwim River, sometimes blasting off gunshots, prompted a lockdown in at least one village school near Bethel on Tuesday night, officials said.

... Trooper pilot Earl Samuelson, who lives in the village of Napaskiak about 7 miles south of Bethel along the river, took off in his Cessna 185 airplane, keeping an eye on the stolen car and radioing its whereabouts to officials, Ipsen said.

UPDATE: Napaskiak blogger Ben Hicok describes the scene Tuesday night, when he was at the trooper pilot's house and a priest casually mentioned someone was driving a stolen police car along the Kuskokwim.

"Earl got on the VHF and started announcing that people needed to get their heads under cover, lest any stray bullets head in their direction," Hicok writes.