Mountain Village sued over man's death in 2024 police holding-cell fire

A wrongful-death lawsuit filed Oct. 15 in Bethel Superior Court accuses the City of Mountain Village, a second-class city of about 597 people on the lower Yukon River in the Kusilvak Census Area, of liability in the 2024 death of a man held in the village police station's holding cell when a fire broke out and killed him. Plaintiff Louise Chiklak names the city as the sole defendant and demands a jury trial. Judge Nathaniel Peters is assigned to the case, and as of filing no attorney was listed on the court docket for either side, according to Alaska News coverage of the filing.

Alaska State Troopers were notified at 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 25, 2024, of a fire at the Mountain Village Police Department, where village police were detaining two men. One man was evacuated; the other was found dead and identified as Lawrence Chiklak, 39, of Mountain Village. A village police officer was treated for minor injuries at a Bethel-area hospital, according to troopers' account of the incident reported by Alaska News.

Troopers said a preliminary investigation found the fire started in one of the occupied holding cells and was likely set with a lighter by one of the two men held there, though they did not specify which man. Both men were being detained under Title 47 holds, the section of state law covering emergency mental-health detention and protective custody for people who are intoxicated or incapacitated by drugs or alcohol. The fire significantly damaged about two-thirds of the police station building. Chiklak's body was sent to the State Medical Examiner's Office for autopsy, and troopers called the investigation active and ongoing at the time. No public update has surfaced since, and the troopers' original report has since been removed from their website.

For a village of fewer than 600 people, a wrongful-death judgment or settlement carries outsized weight. Mountain Village's median household income is $65,078, and nearly 40 percent of residents for whom poverty status was determined live below the poverty line, according to the State of Alaska's Community Database Online. The city runs on a small municipal budget typical of second-class cities in rural Western Alaska, where police departments are often housed in aging, single-purpose buildings, the kind of structure that lost two-thirds of its space in the fire.

Title 47 holds are used statewide by local and village police to detain people in mental-health crises or severe intoxication, often in facilities not built as secure medical holding spaces. It is unclear whether the city has filed a response, whether an insurer is involved, or what damages the suit seeks. It is also unclear whether the medical examiner's autopsy findings or the troopers' investigation into the fire's cause were ever finalized or released.