The fate of a young man behind the wheel in a fatal 2019 Unalaska car crash is now in the hands of an Anchorage jury.
Dustin Ruckman, 24, faces two counts of criminally negligent homicide in the deaths of two Unalaska teen girls.
As prosecutors and Ruckman’s defense attorney have faced off in an Anchorage courtroom — after the court was unable to find enough impartial jurors in Unalaska last month — they painted a picture of what happened:
On May 9, 2019, when Ruckman was 18, he drove his truck up Unalaska’s Mount Ballyhoo with passengers 16-year-old Karly McDonald and 18-year-old Kiara Rentaria Haist.
The truck eventually plummeted about 900 feet down the Ulakta Head Cliff side of the mountain with the two girls inside. They were ejected and died in the fall. Ruckman sustained some minor injuries and told police that he was thrown from the truck.
Nearly 300 people tuned in to the live stream of the trial Monday, as attorneys presented closing arguments, which took up almost the entire day and fixated mainly on the legal definition of criminal negligence. About 25 members of the public attended Monday’s trial in-person, including Ruckman’s parents and the parents of both of the victims. The mood inside the courtroom was quiet and somber, and some shed tears as videos of the day of the incident were replayed for the jury.
“This case comes down to criminal negligence,” Assistant District Attorney Patrick McKay Jr. told the jury. “Accidental conduct can be criminal.”
McKay pointed to witness testimony from Ruckman’s close friend, Luke Shaishnikoff, who had testified during the trial that the pathway where Ruckman’s truck fell down the mountain requires the driver to make a sharp turn, “to stay alive,” as Shaishnikoff put it.
Ruckman was aware of the risk, because he’d driven on the pathway several times before, McKay argued.
Ruckman either failed to perceive the risk or disregarded it, making his behavior criminal, even if it was accidental, McKay said.
Ruckman’s defense attorney, Julia Moudy, disagreed. Ruckman had indeed made a mistake, but his actions did not rise to the level of criminal negligence, Moudy argued.
“The distinction in this case, that's tricky,” she told the jury. “Two girls died. Dustin Ruckman made a mistake. There is nobody who is saying — I'm certainly not saying — that Dustin Ruckman is not at fault for their death.”
Moudy pointed to the differences between civil and criminal negligence.
“The difference between civil negligence, which is a person's fault, that someone did something in error, and criminal negligence is that criminal negligence is when the fault is so great, that error is so great, the disregard in advance — not in hindsight but in advance — of what the person is doing is such a gross deviation of the standard of care that every other person would take, that it's deserving of criminal liability,” Moudy said.
Moudy’s argument often returned to the lack of signage or blockades in the area, which she said would have kept drivers away from the cliff’s edge or the pathways on top of the mountain. Prior to the crash, there was nothing in place that explicitly pointed to the danger of driving in the area or that would have made Ruckman’s actions illegal, she argued.
Moudy returned to a narrative she presented earlier in the trial, about the community’s feelings toward Ruckman after the crash.
“You've also heard that instead of celebrating that Dustin Ruckman miraculously lived, there were people in the community who would rather he had died on that mountain than survived that crash,” she told the jury.
The investigation by the Unalaska Department of Public Safety was biased against the Ruckmans, Moudy said. The department hired an expert to look into the crash and provide a report, but the state never presented an expert during the trial.
“I guarantee you, if the state had one objective witness who could tell you in an expert report — objective, not from Unalaska, not related to this case at all … and they had anything that would say that Dustin Ruckman had done something criminal, or that he had speeded or that he had done something reckless, they would have presented that evidence to you,” Moudy said.
McKay, the prosecutor, told jurors that most of the facts of the case had been established within a half-hour of law enforcement arriving on scene, long before most of the community was aware of the incident.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews handed the case over to jurors for deliberation Monday afternoon.
KUCB's Sofia Stuart-Rasi provided reporting assistance for this story.
