The strange, sad odyssey of an Eagle River veteran killed by police in Colorado

The people who knew Michael Kocher in his 32 years describe him as being so many different things: An Eagle River kid. A U.S. Marine Corps reservist who served in Iraq. A promising figure in the Alaska political activism scene. A tenderhearted giant who stood 6 feet, 8 inches tall. A surfer. A libertine writer. A heroin dealer. A disgraced scammer caught lying about having terminal cancer.

On the evening of March 3, police in Englewood, Colorado, shot and killed Kocher after an hourslong standoff. Kocher was armed and had been holding people hostage inside a home, the Englewood Police Department said in a statement. The incident remains under investigation.

The people in his life are now trying to understand the descent of a man whose initial promise was eclipsed by drugs, and whose life seemed to blur the lines between reality and invention.

A promising young man

Kocher was born and raised in Eagle River, where his dad worked for the railroad and his mom ran an elementary-school cafeteria. He was a talented student and a voracious reader, and could answer any question about "Lord of the Rings" or "Star Wars," his brother Scott Kocher said.

Drawn to military service, Kocher joined Junior ROTC at Chugiak High School. In 2006, when he was 23, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He toughed out boot camp even while suffering with pneumonia, a point of pride for him, his brother said.

Starting in 2008, Kocher spent seven months in Iraq with the Marine Corps Reserve's Delta Company, Anti-Terrorism Battalion, 4th Marine Division based at Elmendorf Air Force Base, according to a profile in Eagle River's Alaska Star newspaper. With his mom's help, he collected soccer balls and bags of toys, candy and school supplies to distribute to Iraqi children.

He told the reporter he was ambivalent about the war, but felt like he needed to serve with others of his generation, an idea he later echoed in a profile for Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Kocher told the Alaska Star his deployment had been to one of the safer areas of the country, and his company saw no combat losses. But Kocher's experience there marked a turning point, his brother said.

"I do not believe he was prepared to handle some of what he witnessed in Syria and Iraq," Scott Kocher said. "Though his time there was mostly spent fixing radios and aiding the locals, the experience changed him."

When he returned to Alaska in the spring of 2009, Kocher's plan was to finish his bachelor's degree at the University of Alaska Anchorage in political science, and then apply to graduate schools for a master's in public administration, with the ultimate goal of becoming a political consultant and running for elected office. He also filed papers to start a political consulting company, Midnight Sun Consulting.

That summer, he volunteered for Anchorage Democrat Bob Poe's campaign for governor. John Aronno, the co-founder and managing editor of the Alaska Commons website, worked with him on the Poe campaign. He remembers Kocher as a guy who spoke about post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction, whose stories were as big as he was.

"He's a guy that would, if he had a couple beers, tell you he'd killed people while serving overseas," Aronno said. "But people kind of viewed him as a teddy bear."

Writer, surfer, heroin dealer

Around 2010 Kocher asked to get out of the Marine Corps Reserves. By then, he'd become a corporal, his brother said. He graduated from UAA with his degree and seemed poised to pursue his career in politics, publishing an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News analyzing fractures within the Alaska Republican Party.

He even testified to the state Legislature in 2014 in support of a bill to make PTSD or brain injuries a mitigating factor in criminal sentences of veterans.

Despite Kocher's charisma and intelligence, he had trouble finding a job and "met with one disappointment after another," his brother said.

Addiction to alcohol and opiates began to take over his life, his brother said.

He left Alaska, spending time in San Francisco and later Southern California, where he pursued his love of surfing. Aronno said they kept in touch, with Kocher telling him about wild times in nightclubs.

"He was moving around a lot, finding places to crash,"  Aronno said.

It was around this time that he approached the editor of a surfing magazine called BeachGrit with a pitch.

"He said he's surfed and had some stories from Iraq," said Derek Reilly, the editor and founder of the magazine, who lives in Bondi Beach, Australia.

Reilly loved his work. He said he found Kocher's writing "almost Hemingway-esque."

BeachGrit published about a half-dozen of Kocher's stories. In one piece titled "I quit surfing to deal heroin" Kocher wrote about addiction and dealing drugs, moving between first- and second-person points of view.

"My story is the same as all the others," he wrote. "I was prescribed painkillers for my knees, tolerance grew and eventually I was cut off by the doctor for 'drug seeking behavior.' … Once I got cut off from my supply the only thing I could do was start buying tar heroin to get my fix. Oxycontin or heroin, the feeling is the same, the addiction is the same, so who f—ing cares, right?"

At the end of the piece, Kocher wrote that the story was "a mix of fiction and nonfiction."

His addiction did stem from an injury, his brother said. At one point, he was getting Suboxone treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs to deal with it, he said.

In 2015, he wrote a piece for BeachGrit about being diagnosed with what he said were cancerous tumors of the spine. On Facebook, he made the same announcement.

"He announced, 'Guys, I'm dying. I don't want to go through treatment.' He said he was just going to travel and enjoy the rest of his days," said Aronno.

An outpouring of support followed, along with a GoFundMe site that raised about $9,000, ostensibly for treatment expenses. By this time, Kocher was living in Denver.

According to a version of events he told to a Denver TV station, the spinal cancer turned out to be a misdiagnosis; by the time he learned he didn't have cancer, he'd spent the donation money — mostly on heroin.

He was arrested on an unrelated drug charge and landed in jail.

The cancer lie had put all the colorful aspects of his past under new scrutiny. One of the editors of BeachGrit questioned him about it in a half-hour taped phone conversation posted on the site. Over and over, Kocher said he was sorry.

How much of Michael Kocher's life was real, and how much was invented?

"Most of my past is a mix of truth, exaggeration and fabrication," Kocher himself wrote in a Facebook mea culpa. "I was a Marine. I did go to Iraq. I was a heroin dealer. I did work with Russians."

It also left lingering bitterness with some who had been his friends. Long after the fact, vitriol poured into Kocher's heavily used social media accounts, Aronno noted.

"He posted a few times a day. He'd say, 'You don't want to f— with me,' " Aronno said.

'So many people don't take me seriously'

Last year, things seemed to be going better for Kocher. In the part of his life he shared publicly, he posted pictures of alpine lakes and Rocky Mountain snowfields, writing about how thankful he was for another chance at getting sober.

His family in Alaska wasn't really in close contact by then, but his brother thinks he did manage to get himself away from drugs and alcohol for a time.

"I think he did make an earnest attempt to get sober," Scott Kocher said. "The drugs kept creeping back in because of the people he had in his social circle."

On the last day of his life, the posts darkened.

March 3, 6:48 a.m.: When they come for me I'll be sitting at my desk with a gun in my hand and a bullet proof (sic) vest singing my my my how the time does fly when you know you're gonna die at the end of the night…

March 3, 12:39 p.m.: Goodbye

Michael Kocher came fully unraveled that day. His family may never know exactly why.

"Something set him off," his brother said.

At 1:46 p.m., police in the Denver suburb of Englewood were called to a house where an armed man had barricaded himself with other people.

Just three minutes before police arrived, Michael Kocher posted one final status update on Facebook:

So many people don't take me seriously.