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In the wake of allegations that Bethel resident Peter Tony sexually abused a 4-year-old and possibly other children over decades, the 69-year-old's stepdaughter claims she too was abused.
Kimberley Hahn Bruesch, 48, accuses her stepfather of sexually assaulting her and two sisters when they were kids. Her sisters never healed from the abuse, with both committing suicide as adults in the 1990s, Bruesch said in interviews with Alaska Dispatch this week.
Today, Bruesch lives in Ketchikan, where she works as a tour guide in Tongass National Forest. She has her own stable family life and regards herself as healed from the trauma of her childhood.
Her sisters never made it there. Bruesch's older sister, Robin, took her life in 1990. Teresa followed in 1998.
Teresa died on April 14, 1998. In her suicide note, she wrote: "I just told (my daughter) about what my Dad did to me. She'll know now why I did what I did."
"Even as an adult, my father has found a way to destroy me," she said in her last letter to family.