This Is How We Rise

Two years apart, two women were found dead in the same stretch of South Anchorage, near Golden View Drive and Bulgaria Drive, a secluded Hillside neighborhood set back on land with long driveways, big sky views, and a deliberate distance from the hubbub of town.

Around Bulgaria Drive, typical home values often land in the mid–high six figures and above, this is the part of Anchorage where people with money buy space and quiet.

On May 7, 2016, Darlene Kunayak was found in the woods where those roads meet. Reports show a passerby flagged down an officer after seeing her body, visible from the road, (strange an officer was driving by) and police go on to say in their reports they didn’t believe Darlene had been there long.

Later reporting relayed the autopsy summary and the conclusion that there were no fatal injuries and no evidence of foul play but noted something that should stop anyone in their tracks.

Investigators believed Darlene may have died elsewhere and been dropped off where she was found.

Two years later, on July 9, 2018, Marione Evan was found dead in the same area, after she’d been missing for several days. The reporting that followed doesn’t have details about what happened and that matters.

Because for families, silence is not neutrality.

Silence is the message.

Marione’s family did what families always end up doing when official answers don’t arrive. They organized, raised money and tried to bring her home with dignity. Alaska’s News Source reported that her family planned to bury her on Yupik land in Tuntutuliak near the Kuskokwim River, and that she left behind four children and “a loving family.”

She was a loved mother, she was a daughter and her family deserved more than a headline and a fundraiser link.

This is where the way we talk about deaths like these can either honor a life or quietly diminish it.

Public conversation and media coverage or lack of, labels a person and seems to somehow make it their responsibility for being a “victim”.

A toxicology result becomes a verdict on a person’s worth.

Housing status becomes an excuse for why she was “easy prey”.

That’s convenient for everyone who benefits from low expectations. It is brutal for families who are still waiting for someone to care as much as they do.

And here is the part that keeps catching me in the throat: both women were found in the same kind of “in-between” place.

The kind of place where it’s easy to imply the woods did it, the elements did it, misfortune did it.

But the woods don’t move bodies.

If a person did not die where they were found, then there is a human story there that still needs to be told, traced, checked, and proven.

I’m not claiming these cases are connected. But I’m not saying they aren’t connected.

The location is a repeating detail that deserves more attention than it has gotten, and that “no evidence of foul play” is not the same thing as closure.

It is not the same thing as answers.

It is not the same thing as a family knowing everything was done to learn the truth of what happened to their loved one.

If we want a city that protects people consistently, not selectively, then we have to keep saying their names, and we have to keep asking for the basics.

Thorough investigations, clear communication with family members, and accountability that doesn’t depend on whether the public finds a life “sympathetic enough.”

Say their names: Darlene Kunayak. Marione Evan.

Their families are still here and they deserve more than what small investigation steps their loved ones’ death have been given.