Alaska News

After public death at AFN convention, only hints of the story of man who jumped

Anchorage police on Sunday identified the man who jumped over a third-floor railing one day earlier and fell nearly 60 feet to his death as Anthony Choquette.

Choquette's suicide played out in front of a crowd of adults and children at the end of the annual Alaska Federation of Natives conference at the Dena'ina Civic and Convention Center.

His death has led to anguished grieving as well as questions about the man and his reasons for taking his life so publicly at a gathering where suicide prevention is often a major theme.

On Sunday, most of those questions remained unanswered.

Attempts to contact several of Choquette's relatives were unsuccessful, but public records construct a rough outline of the facts of Anthony Dean Choquette's life on paper: He was 49 years old. He had lived in Alaska all his life.

Permanent Fund Dividend applications going back decades listed his home as the Eastern Aleutian fishing town of Sand Point, then Anchorage starting in the late 1990s and, most recently, Palmer.

He'd worked as a commercial fisherman out of Sand Point for more than a decade, according to crew member license applications. The last time he applied was two summers ago. In past years, he'd applied for licenses to hunt and fish.

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His last known address was a house in the Butte area of Palmer.

The home was owned by Olga Karlsen, a 57-year-old member of a big Sand Point family who died in February. Her obituary names Choquette as a sibling.

No answers for the questions about what may have led to his highly public death can be gleaned from the records.

But they reveal the barest hints of what may have been unspooling in Choquette's life in recent years: In 2011, an address listed as an addiction recovery center in Palmer. A misdemeanor conviction for driving without a license last year.

Where the formal trail of Choquette's life on paper stopped, Facebook picked it up.

As word spread of his death, people who said they knew him posted of their shock, sadness and anger. The posts revealed other small facts about the man:

People called Choquette by his middle name, Dean, not Anthony.

One woman wrote that she saw him last in Sand Point and he gave her sunglasses. Another wrote that he had a habit of giving her a kiss on the hand as a greeting.

May his soul finally rest in peace, someone said.

Michelle Theriault Boots

Michelle Theriault Boots is a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. She focuses on stories about the intersection of public policy and Alaskans' lives. Before joining the ADN in 2012, she worked at daily newspapers on the West Coast and earned a master's degree from the University of Oregon.

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