Randall Roe's life started circling the drain after a bicycle ride with the kids went bad. The accident left him with a catastrophic brain injury.
Ten years later, lost in a haze of self-medicating cocaine and alcohol, he ended up in a car with a stranger who slashed his throat during a random sexual encounter.
The man who killed him, Richard Hunter, is on trial for murder. He got to the car that night down his own destructive path that started when a relative dropped him on his head as an infant.
The two strangers' paths crossed on Nov. 21, 2006. Roe, 47, ended up with 11 slices to his throat. And Hunter faces the rest of his life in prison.
Hunter, now 29, says it was self-defense.
Both sides agree the men were in the blur of drug-induced highs when they ran into each other. Roe was on cocaine. Hunter was drunk off a 40-ounce beer and vodka. They met somewhere on Fourth Avenue. Roe offered Hunter a ride. What happened between them, consensual oral sex in the front seat of Roe's F-150 pickup, led to a violent fight.
How they both ended up there -- two strangers battling their own demons -- is a story of two lives spinning out of control.
TWO KNIVES
Hunter had been staying at the Henry House, an Anchorage facility for mentally challenged people. But he wasn't allowed to drink there, so he planned a night out, prosecutor John Skidmore said. He armed himself with condoms and multiple layers of clothing in case he needed to sleep outside.
Hunter says he doesn't remember the night exactly. He remembers consenting to sex, then after it started deciding he didn't want it.
He asked the driver -- Roe -- to take him back to Henry House. Both sides agree on that. But Roe headed in another direction. Hunter asked him to stop, but he didn't, according to defense attorney Paul Maslakowski.
The truck was on Minnesota Drive near Tudor Road when Hunter pulled a pocketknife and held it to Roe's throat. He wanted him to know he was serious.
Roe stopped the car but pulled his own knife, the defense says. Hunter, blind in his left eye, couldn't see Roe well. Roe, partially paralyzed on his right side, couldn't defend himself well. Both fought to protect those sides, their vulnerabilities.
When it was over, both men were cut, but Hunter cut longer and harder, slicing open Roe's jugular veins, exposing his trachea. Hunter ran, trailing drops of blood with bits of Roe's beard still clinging to them.
Hunter is charged with first- and second-degree murder, and the jury has to decide if he meant to kill Roe or if he just meant to gravely injure him, or if he was acting entirely in self-defense.
BOTTOM-BOUND
Roe's family says the end of his life really began in 1998, when the 39-year-old electrician got hit by a car on Spenard Road while riding his bike. He spent weeks in a coma, according to his ex-wife Dena James, who came to the trial on Tuesday.
More disturbing to the people around him than his physical injuries was that he became a different person, something brain-injury experts say is common. Friends used to describe him as "the boy next door," James said. The personality that emerged post-coma was not that. He wasn't the father who liked to go skiing or biking with his kids. He was despondent, depressed. He started punching walls, James said.
He tried to be an electrician again but had only partial use of his right side. He took his kids to jobs with him to be his hands, but it didn't work. His marriage fell apart, and his children didn't want to have anything to do with him any more.
Before the accident, he had been arrested a couple of times on misdemeanor assault charges. But after the accident, he started accumulating arrests like he was collecting them. Assault, disorderly conduct, stalking. They kept coming.
His family knew he was not well. But they had no idea he had sunk so low. Next to his slain body, Anchorage police found a crack pipe.
FAR FROM HOME
Hunter grew up in several Yukon-Kuskokwim villages but spent most of his years in Scammon Bay, a Yup'ik village with 500 people one mile from the Bering Sea. He was in Anchorage for mental health treatment because Bethel couldn't offer him what he needed, said his father, Homer Hunter.
"From the very bottom of my heart, I wish it didn't have to happen, but it happened," Homer said of Roe's death. "But if (Hunter) hadn't have been sent to Anchorage, it never would have happened."
Homer Hunter thinks his son was not being treated properly for his mental illnesses and was running scared that night, frightened by living in the big city. He even found Bethel frightening, the elder Hunter said.
The family first noticed the stewing anger in their son when he was 15, Hunter said. The father thinks his son was angry at him and his wife for drinking so much back then --- a vice that mired him in his own troubles, he said. His son also got teased a lot because of his poor eyesight.
His son was counseled, put on medication and sent to Bethel for treatment. He got a variety of medicine, including Prozac.
His first stint with the law was when he was 17. He was sent to a Bethel juvenile detention center. He dropped out of high school and spent the following years in and out of jail, arrested over and over for assault. He was on and off with his medications.
Homer Hunter said his son only got violent when he drank. All of the assault charges were alcohol-related, he said.
Now, after spending the past three years in jail on the murder charge, his son is a changed man, Homer Hunter said. He has matured -- enough that he wishes he could take back what happened that night, and enough to say it will never happen again.
The trial continues today.
Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.
By MEGAN HOLLAND
mholland@adn.com