Man killed by police in downtown Juneau

A 35-year-old Juneau man was shot and killed Monday after a confrontation with Juneau police and Alaska State Troopers.

Juneau Police officers were investigating an earlier report of an attack on Steven Kissack in which he “pulled out a knife and refused to follow commands,” police wrote in an online statement Monday evening.

An Alaska Wildlife Trooper and other Juneau police officers arrived at the scene and shot Kissack with beanbag bullets while negotiating with him to drop the knife, the dispatch said.

Kissack “attacked the officers while brandishing the knife,” according to the police’s initial version of events. He was shot by “multiple police officers” and pronounced dead at a Juneau hospital.

The Juneau Empire reported that Kissack was homeless and was known in the capital for his dog. The dog was in the area at the time of Kissack’s death, was unharmed and is “being cared for,” according to Austin McDaniel, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.

The incident occurred shortly after 1 p.m. on busy Front Street in downtown Juneau, police said.

The Alaska Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to questions about where exactly the incident occurred, what type of knife police say Kissack used, or what other attempts were made to use less-lethal force. The Alaska Department of Investigation will review the case, the agency said.

The shooting is the second fatal police shooting in a week. Police shot and killed a 67-year-old man “wielding a speargun” on a crowded beach in Kasilof on July 8.

Since May, Anchorage Police Department officers have shot five people, three of them fatally.

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