Anthony Crawford Jones, a 36-year-old Black/African American male, was working the midnight hours in Dillingham when a burglary alarm cut through the cold of February 12, 1992. He and another Dillingham Police Department officer moved toward a local hardware store at about 12:45 a.m., scanning the dark storefront when gunfire erupted. In the exchange that followed, Officer Jones—known around town as “Flip” or “Tony”—was struck and fatally wounded.
He had served with the department for two years and left behind a wife and daughter. The alarm's blare, the quick response, and the sudden shots framed a loss that would echo through the small Bristol Bay community.
Through that night and into the next day, the search for the shooter unfolded alongside a tense, prolonged confrontation. Court filings later described a 14-hour standoff tied to the incident and a single. 22-caliber round that ended Officer Jones's life. The investigation led authorities to a 17-year-old from nearby Aleknagik, whose troubled path had already placed him under juvenile supervision. He was arrested and charged in the killing, an arrest that brought an exhausted quiet to a town that had been listening for sirens and updates since the first alarm.
In the months that followed, prosecutors assembled the case while the community mourned. The young suspect—identified in contemporaneous reporting as Eugene Randal Maud—ultimately pleaded no contest to first-degree murder. As part of the agreement, two additional attempted-murder counts were dropped, and the parties discussed a sentencing cap well below Alaska's 99-year maximum for the offense. The plea captured both the gravity of the crime and the legal system's effort to resolve a case that had shaken an entire region.
When sentencing came, the court imposed a 65-year term, closing the judicial chapter even as remembrance continued. Each retelling returns to the same stark facts: the early-morning call to a hardware store, the approach by two officers into the dark, and the sudden gunfire that took a 36-year-old husband and father from his family and colleagues. In Dillingham, memory is kept not only in police rolls and memorial pages but also in the annual “Tony's Run,” a community event first conceived by Officer Jones himself and later carried on in his name, a tradition born of grief and sustained by affection.
