After a deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial last spring and various failed attempts to go to trial, 25-year-old Dustin Ruckman is once again facing two counts of criminally negligent homicide.
Over the next couple of weeks, a jury will decide if Ruckman is criminally liable for the deaths of two Unalaska teen girls who sustained fatal injuries in a car wreck nearly seven years ago.
Nicole Harvey is the older sister of Kiara Renteria Haist, 18, one of the girls who died as Ruckman’s truck plummeted nearly 900 feet down Ulakta Head Cliff on Unalaska’s Mount Ballyhoo. Renteria Haist was accompanied by her friend and Ruckman’s girlfriend, Karly McDonald, 16, who also died.
This is the second time Harvey will watch as witnesses take the stand, attorneys make arguments and jurors deliberate on a verdict regarding her sister’s death.
Harvey said some of the agony of losing her sister has dulled over the last seven years. Still, it’s painful to revisit memories of her sister.
“[The start of the trial] kind of cracked that open for me again,” Harvey said in a phone interview with KUCB Friday.
Harvey won’t be attending the trial in person this time, but she said she hopes her mom, her stepdad and McDonald’s parents can find some sense of closure and peace this go around.
She said she’s trying to avoid getting attached to any specific outcome. None will change what happened, she said.
“I think the reality is that this is kind of a losing situation for everybody,” Harvey said. “Because the fact of the matter is that Kiara and Karly lost their lives in this incident. And because of that, those two families — my family, and the McDonald family — are forever changed.”
She said the first trial gave her some respite and helped her learn more about what happened that tragic day, May 9, 2019. But the length of the case, spanning nearly seven years, has made finding closure more difficult.
“It's just left me and my family kind of suspended in this perpetual state of mourning the loss, and in the specific way that the loss occurred,” she said.
Ruckman’s attorney, Julia Moudy, has also told the court she wants the case to go to trial and come to an end.
On Friday morning, Moudy presented her opening statement to a group of Anchorage jurors, contending that some people in the Unalaska community wanted to punish Ruckman right away, instead of “celebrating” that he had survived — a narrative she presented during the first trial as well.
“There were some in that very small community who believed that he should be punished from day one,” Moudy said.
Moudy told jurors that they would see evidence of bias and that they will have to determine whether or not that influenced the investigation.
She said that the lead investigating officer, Theresa Ah-Siu, was friends with the victims’ families and violated local police department policies.
“It will come out that [Ah-Siu] withheld evidence,” Moudy told the court. “You will hear evidence that the Unalaska Police Department came to conclusions based on her assumptions.”
The previous attempt to go to trial in November was halted after new evidence surfaced on Ah-Siu’s personal cellphone. Ah-Siu told the court she found photos and video connected to the investigation after the first trial ended.
While Moudy conceded that Ruckman is at fault for the deaths of the girls, she argued that he is not responsible for criminal negligence.
“You'll have to then determine whether the conduct was a gross deviation from ordinary care,” she told jurors. “And if the state cannot prove that, then your verdict will be ‘not guilty.’”
Prosecutor John Skidmore is representing the state in the criminal trial, replacing Patrick McKay Jr., who is now a Palmer District Court judge.
Skidmore presented a similar question to the jury during his opening remarks.
“Driving up that hill in that F-150, in those circumstances, had he failed to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk?” Skidmore said. “And was that failure a gross deviation from what a reasonable person would do? That's what this case is about. That's why I tell you this is about recklessness.”
Skidmore discussed the terrain of Ulakta Head Cliff where the truck went over the edge, describing a section of the area with the testimony of a witness, Ruckman’s friend Luke Shaishnikoff.
“Luke will tell you, in his Tacoma, he can't see the edge of the cliff…he will tell you that he cannot see the top of the hill, that he cannot see the cliff's edge when he drives up,” Skidmore said. “And he will testify that, in order to prevent going over the cliff…he will tell you he had to make a hard left hand turn in order to avoid the inevitable.”
Skidmore and Moudy declined a KUCB request for comment on the ongoing case.
The court will return Monday morning to discuss witness testimony and evidence before welcoming the jury back. The trial is expected to last another two to three weeks, with the court assembling for half-days.
