Brian Smith sentenced to 226 years for killings

Brian Smith, the Anchorage resident convicted in February of killing two women, was sentenced to 226 years in prison Friday.

In an Anchorage courtroom packed with family members, advocates and members of the media, Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby handed down the sentence, which ensures that Smith will spend the rest of his life in prison for the deaths of Veronica Abouchuk in 2018 and Kathleen Jo Henry in 2019. Both women were Alaska Native and the case became a focal point for activists, some of whom attended the trial every day, seeking to draw attention to the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people in Alaska.

Saxby described Smith as a person so dangerous that “if he is ever released, he will probably kill again.”

During a monthlong trial in February, jurors heard about how South Africa-born Smith cruised Anchorage for vulnerable women — often homeless, suffering from mental illness or addiction — for sexual encounters that turned violent.

Smith had promised Abouchuk, a mother originally from Stebbins, a place to stay, alcohol and food when he picked her up in 2018, took her to his home, shot her in the head and dumped her body near the Old Glenn Highway. Henry was killed in September 2019 in a Midtown hotel room, where Smith filmed her torture and death by strangulation.

The jury, which watched 12 graphic video clips of Henry’s murder as part of evidence, convicted Smith on all charges. Two of the jurors attended the sentencing, saying the case had profoundly affected them.

The sentence was appropriate, said Michael Stewart, one of the jurors. “It was the law being executed to the letter,” he said.

Typically in court, victims are referred to by their initials instead of their names. At the sentencing, Saxby said he would call the women by their full names, to restore dignity “to some tiny extent.”

“The essence of what happened to the two women — they were treated as something other than human,” he said. “They were dehumanized. It seems to me that the more respectful thing to do is refer to them by name, rather than by something less.”

Saxby found that Smith was among the worst offenders in each of the charges because he callously and for his own pleasure killed Henry and Abouchuk, filming and taking photos of the deaths and speaking, in the case of Henry’s torture and killing, about doing it for an audience.

Both Henry and Abouchuk were treated “about as horribly as a person can be treated,” Saxby said.

“He takes joy in torturing and killing vulnerable women,” Saxby said.

As part of a sentencing memorandum filed with the court, the prosecution included photos found on Smith’s phone in 2019 that show a woman — not thought to be Henry or Abouchuk — incapacitated and bloody, lying on grass. The woman has never been identified, and it is not clear whether she is alive in the images.

When confronted with the images by police, Smith said he had left a woman passed out outdoors. The encounter had occurred shortly after Henry’s death, prosecutor Brittany Dunlop said.

“Certainly she was harmed,” Dunlop said at the sentencing. “Those images show a complete lack of remorse for what he did and a continuation of the predatory behavior he started with Ms. Abouchuk.”

“There is true evil in the world and it is sitting in this courtroom with us,” Dunlop went on to say.

Abouchuk’s daughter Kristy Grimaldi gave the sole victim impact statement of the sentencing. She thanked her mother for instilling a “love of family” in her and said she felt relieved knowing Smith would “rot in prison.”

Grimaldi said she felt her mother’s continued presence in her life.

“I feel her all around me, watching over me,” she said. “No one can take that away.”

Smith declined to speak on his own behalf at the sentencing.

Timothy Ayer, Smith’s public defender, argued that with a 99-year mandatory sentence for the first-degree murder conviction that the jury found included “substantial torture,” Smith, 53, was never getting out of prison. A sentence of more than the minimum of 123 years would be in service of “retribution” rather than community condemnation, Ayer argued.

The judge did not agree.

After the sentence was read, Smith, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, was fingerprinted and led from the courtroom in handcuffs.