Officials with the Alaska Department of Corrections say a 20-year-old Wrangell man who died Saturday after hanging himself at the Ketchikan Correctional Center was not on suicide watch.
Brendon Sample was the second Alaska inmate to die by suicide in less than a month.
Sample was being held in a housing unit at the Ketchikan jail Thursday when guards found him unconscious in his cell and started trying to resuscitate him, DOC officials have said.
He was taken by medevac to Anchorage, where he died at a hospital Saturday morning.
Sample apparently hanged himself with a bed sheet while his bunkmate was out of the cell in a common area, according to DOC spokeswoman Sherrie Daigle.
Correctional officers had last checked on him 28 minutes before he was found, she said.
Sample was not under any mental health precautions, which can include restricted access to items such as sheets, at the time of the incident, Daigle said.
"When he was booked he was questioned about being suicidal," she said. "He said he wasn't having any suicidal thoughts."
Sample was in jail for the first time. He had been arrested Jan. 10 on suspicion of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor, according to Alaska State Troopers.
The charge stemmed from an incident in which Sample allegedly had sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl, according to troopers. Alaska law defines such contact as a class-B felony offense if the defendant is over 18 and the complainant is under 16.
Court records show Sample had no previous adult criminal record.
His family couldn't be reached Sunday.
A Facebook group called "Brendon Sample We Love You" had grown to nearly 200 people by Sunday evening.
The death was the first at the Ketchikan jail since 2004, Daigle said.
But it wasn't the only recent jail suicide in Alaska.
On Dec. 19, Robert Alexie, 28, used "a piece of clothing" to kill himself in the bathroom of the Anchorage Correctional Complex's booking area, DOC officials said.
He had been arrested for walking away from a halfway house hours earlier.
Alexie was the brother of Mary Ann Alexie, a mother of four who disappeared in Spenard soon after she moved to Anchorage from Fairbanks in October 2012 to study to be a medical assistant, their sister Josephine Guynes said from her home in Nikolai on Sunday.
Robert Alexie grew up in Nikolai and Crooked Creek, his sister said. He moved to Anchorage five or six years ago to get his GED.
He was deeply affected by Mary Ann's still-unsolved disappearance, and harbored anger toward law enforcement authorities he felt weren't doing enough to find her, Guynes said.
"He was pretty angry. They wouldn't give us no answers, to this day," she said. "It had a great impact on him."
Still, news of his suicide came as a total shock, she said.
"Other than missing my sister, he never showed or expressed any signs that he wanted to hurt himself."
Alexie's mother, Anna Alexie John, said she can't understand how her son was able to kill himself inside a jail.
"How could it happen in a bathroom?" she said. "To be alone for that period of time. You'd think the guard would be right there with him."
Earlier this month, Alexie John buried her son in Crooked Creek, the village where he spent his earliest years.
She is still there, observing the customary 40-day Russian Orthodox mourning period.
"He was my baby," she said.