On March 19, 2013, Thomas O. Madole, a 54-year-old white male Village Public Safety Officer in Manokotak, Alaska, set out to speak with a resident after reporting to Alaska State Troopers around 4:00 p.m. that he was going to follow up on an earlier altercation. In the remote village, an hour later, a citizen called troopers to report a shooting. When troopers reached Manokotak, they found the 54-year-old male officer dead outside a residence, killed by gunfire while on duty.
The loss rippled quickly across the Bristol Bay region and through Alaska's small-community public safety network.
Alaska State Troopers soon identified and arrested a suspect: Leroy B. Dick Jr., a 42-year-old man from Manokotak. He was taken into custody and initially held in Dillingham, charged with first-degree murder. At his first appearance, he told the judge he had committed the crime and was held on $1,000,000 bail. In the days after the killing, local and state outlets reported that the 54-year-old male officer had been unarmed when he was shot, underscoring the vulnerability of rural first responders who often serve alone as the only on-scene law enforcement presence for miles.
Over the next year and a half, the case moved through the courts. In November 2014, a Dillingham jury deliberated for roughly an hour and a half before returning a unanimous verdict that Leroy Dick Jr. was guilty of first-degree murder for the killing of the 54-year-old male officer. Reporters noted that the defendant had admitted to the shooting multiple times in recorded statements, a point that loomed over the brief deliberations and the emotional scene in the courtroom as the verdict was read.
In February 2015, the judge imposed a 99-year sentence on Leroy B. Dick Jr. for murdering the 54-year-old male Village Public Safety Officer in Manokotak. Coverage of the sentencing emphasized that the victim was unarmed and working in service to a remote community when he was killed, and that the maximum term reflected both the gravity of killing an on-duty law enforcement officer and the defendant's own admissions. With the sentence pronounced, the case closed in court, leaving the village and the wider state to remember a fallen officer whose final radio call had been a routine step in a day's work.
