‘We looked for her’: Daughter of homicide victim testifies in Smith trial

Wednesday marked the first full day of testimony in the trial of Brian Steven Smith, which started in Anchorage earlier this week. Smith is charged in the 2018 death of Veronica Abouchuk, 52, and 2019 slaying of Kathleen Jo Henry, 30.

Prosecutors contend the South African-born Smith, who lived a middle-class life in Anchorage, targeted homeless Alaska Native women, luring them in with shelter, food, money or alcohol before violently attacking them, taking photos and videos of their deaths.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on Abouchuk, a mother originally from the St. Michael area.

Jurors first heard testimony from a man who stumbled on Abouchuk’s skull while picking chaga mushrooms near the Old Glenn Highway in 2019.

Then, Abouchuk’s daughter, Kristy Grimaldi, took the stand, describing a mother who was beloved by family but whose struggles with addiction led her to homelessness.

Alcohol was a longtime issue for her mother, Grimaldi said.

“As a kid, I really didn’t understand why or how my mother was, but as an adult, I just really felt for her,” she said.

Abouchuk had many family members and friends surrounding her and even lived with Grimaldi for a time, she said. But she ended up back on the street, she said.

“She just kept saying she had to go,” Grimaldi said.

Sometimes her mom stayed with friends or family members, couchsurfing. Sometimes she stayed outside. But the family was used to having intermittent contact with her, she said.

In 2017, Grimaldi got a call from the police saying her mother had died and that she needed to come to the medical examiner to identify the body. She went, only to learn it had been a misidentification — a different woman had died of an overdose and Abouchuk’s identification card had been found with the body. Her mother was not dead. But she also had not been heard from.

“It was like, thank God,” Grimaldi said. “But, you know, where is she?”

The family heard less and less from Abouchuk.

In the summer of 2018, they stopped hearing from her at all.

Prosecutors believe it was mid-August 2018 when Smith lured Abouchuk to the Geneva Woods home he shared with his wife, offering her a warm meal and place to sleep. Then he shot her in the head as she lay on the couch, prosecutors contend.

After completely losing contact with her, Abouchuk’s family felt something was wrong and took action, Grimaldi testified.

“We looked for her,” she said.

Grimaldi went to a liquor store she knew her mother had frequented. She tried the hospital. She went downtown. She got confusing and conflicting accounts of potential sightings, she said.

By February 2019, Grimaldi decided to report her mother missing to the Anchorage Police Department, she testified.

A few months passed. In April 2019 two men hunting for chaga mushrooms off the Old Glenn Highway discovered a human skull. One of the men, Khan Meas, said he and his mushroom-foraging partner realized quickly the skull was too large to be an animal, and looked human.

They called the police, and a trooper met them on the spot.

The skull, state forensic pathologist Dr. Cristin Rolf testified Wednesday, had what was determined to be a bullet hole in the left side. There was no exit wound visible. No other remains were ever found.

The state originally tried to determine if the skull might belong to two other missing Alaska Native women — Mary Alexie and Linda Skeek, Rolf testified. It did not.

Later in 2019, Veronica Abouchuk’s family received a call from Anchorage police detectives. She thought at first that her mother had been found alive.

“I was in complete denial holding on to any hope,” Grimaldi testified. “I remember thinking, “they found her, she’s somewhere.”

Wednesday’s testimony also included Valerie Casler, who testified that she stole Smith’s cellphone from his car while on a “date” with him, later turning it in police after viewing contents that showed what appeared to be a murder.

She said her story to police had evolved over the years because she was scared of telling the truth — that she had been on crack cocaine and prostituting at the time. But she said she was willing to testify in court because she believed she was familiar with the woman being victimized in the photos and videos.

“I knew her,” Casler testified. “And I considered her my friend.”