Town note
The first settlers were Tlingit people from the northern winter village of Tuxekan, who used the place as a summer fishing camp.
about 0:06:33The story
Klawock sits on Prince of Wales Island in south-east Alaska, in what the hosts call an unorganised area rather than a county. It is reached by ferry or by air. At the time of the story the population was 805, having been 19 in 1920 and about 400 in 1930, after a cannery opened. Median household income was $53,750 a year and the median home cost $204,400. The first settlers were Tlingit people from the winter village of Tuxekan, who used the place as a summer fishing camp, and the name comes from Lawa, the Tlingit man who founded the community. A San Francisco company opened the first cannery in Alaska there in 1878, a post office followed in 1882, the city incorporated in 1929, and in 1934 Congress paid for the cannery to expand on condition that the town stayed liquor-free. In 1931 a member of the Barrymore family took a totem pole from the abandoned village of Tuxekan; it was returned to the Tlingit in 2015. Every 16 February the town marks Elizabeth Peratrovich Day, after the Tlingit woman who demanded equal fishing rights for Native Alaskans in 1945.
Lincoln Peratrovich, known to everyone as Bingo, was 80 in March 2023. He had lived in Klawock all his life, alone in a trailer on Church Street, and he was related to the Peratrovich family that produced the town's mayors and legislators. On the afternoon of Monday 20 March 2023 he was outside splitting firewood when a girl walked past. He had poor eyesight, and he whistled at her, thinking she was older; when she turned he saw that she was 13. He invited her inside for something to eat. She said no, went home and told her uncle, who called the Alaska State Troopers. The troopers interviewed the girl and then Peratrovich, who admitted the whistle and the invitation but denied following her or threatening her with an axe. They concluded that no crime had been committed and suggested the family seek a restraining order.
That night the family posted on Facebook, saying Peratrovich was sexually interested in young girls. By the end of the night about 300 comments had gathered, moving from concern to anger to rage to plans for violence.
She said she was frightened to pass the trailer, and the men told her they would go right up to it. Peratrovich was asleep on a mattress on the floor. They punched and kicked him, then beat him with firewood from beside the fireplace, a folding chair, a wooden milk crate and a 15-pound decorative cannonball, aiming at his head and face. A passing motorist honked repeatedly and the three ran, leaving him dying, and were picked up by two other juveniles. Someone called 911. Troopers had to come from Craig and arrived at about 3 a.m., 90 minutes later, because Klawock had no police force: its chief had died unexpectedly that January and nobody had been hired. Peratrovich died before reaching hospital. The autopsy found blunt-force trauma to the head and face, with no defensive wounds, consistent with a sleeping man beaten by several objects.
Detectives preserved the Facebook post and its comments. On 22 March they found the girl, who told them she had stayed outside and named the three men.
The niece's post that her uncle had been killed over gossip divided the town, and people began deleting their comments.
The judge said he hoped the case would be a wake-up call about spreading information online.
O'Brien lived in Deer Park, Texas, worked as an optician at Texas State Optical in Houston, and was a deacon and choir member at the Second Baptist Church. Deep in debt, he had taken out life insurance on both his children, reaching about $100,000. On Halloween 1974 he took them trick-or-treating in Pasadena and produced five 21-inch Pixy Sticks, saying a man at a house where nobody answered the door had handed them over. His son Timothy, ten, ate one, said it tasted bitter, was given Kool-Aid and died on the way to hospital less than an hour later. The autopsy found potassium cyanide. The top of each stick had been refilled with cyanide and stapled shut. No house on the two streets they visited had given out Pixy Sticks, and the householder named by O'Brien, an air traffic controller called Courtney Melvin, was ruled out.