October 25, 2005

• This Sugar Is No Sweetheart — updated

  Some people  …just  …shouldn’t  …drink.  I
  could make a strong case that there’s really nobody who should poison
  himself with alcohol, but for some of us it’s more obvious than for
  others.  Angelo Sugar is one of those guys.

  Last Thursday night, Angelo Sugar and his friend Justin Ignatius were
  playing cribbage and drinking homebrew from a five-gallon bucket at his
  home in Nunam Iqua, a village on the Yukon River in Western
  Alaska.  Now he’s in jail on $100,000 bond, facing 19 charges
  including three counts of attempted murder.

  Ignatius said, “We were
  all OK playing cards. Everybody was having a good time enjoying the
  moment, then everything just went
  haywire.”

  Angelo first beat his wife with a shotgun, apparently (and fortunately)
  damaging it in the process.  When he subsequently tried to shoot
  her with it, it wouldn’t fire.  She fled, carrying her one year
  old child.  As she was leaving, she saw him hit his friend Justin in the head with another firearm.  Ignatius said he
  doesn’t remember getting hit: “I blacked out playing cards and the next
  thing I noticed I was waking up in the morning and my pillow was really
  bloody,”

  Sugar then barricaded himself in the home with four children, troopers said.

  At one point, Sugar grabbed his 1-month-old
  son out of the arms of the 13-year-old girl, and threw the infant to
  the floor, [Trooper] Widmier said. The girl told troopers the baby landed in a
  puddle of home-brew that had spilled from a five-gallon bucket, he
  said.

  As the girl grabbed the baby, Sugar punched her and choked her, Widmier said.

  “He had his hands around her so hard that she was blacking in and out.”

  He raped her on a bed with the infant crying
  beside her, Widmier said. Afterward, he rolled on top of the infant,
  Widmier said. The girl pushed him aside to pull the baby to safety.

  The girl’s 5-year-old brother and 7-year-old cousin watched the rape, Widmier said.

  The children told troopers Sugar then pointed
  the shotgun at himself and told the 13-year-old to pull the trigger,
  Widmier and Wilkinson said. She refused.

  Sugar then fired himself, “missing the girl by inches,” Widmier said.

  Village residents called troopers in Bethel
  about 5:30 a.m. Friday. Troopers had to charter a plane to get to the
  village because the state aircraft they normally use was being
  serviced, Widmier said.

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  Many remote Alaskan villages have their
  own Village Public Safety Officers, but Nunam Iqua ran out of funds to
  pay their policeman over a year ago.  It took the State Troopers
  four hours to reach the village.  By the time they got there
  Angelo Sugar had accumulated quite a list of legal infractions. 
  He is charged with three counts of first-degree attempted murder, first-degree sexual
  assault, first-degree sexual abuse of a minor, kidnapping, two counts
  of second-degree assault, one count of third-degree assault, three
  counts of fourth-degree assault, fourth-degree misconduct involving
  weapons, three counts of reckless endangerment, manufacturing alcohol,
  furnishing alcohol to a minor in a dry community and possession of
  alcohol in a dry community.

  Alaska has a “local option” policy, and the native villages differ in
  how the alcohol issue is handled in each one.  Some, like Nunam
  Iqua, are “dry,” no alcohol allowed.  Others are “damp,” with
  alcohol regulated by Federal Indian statutes.  Bootlegging and
  homebrewing are common, and I have heard stories of “case parties” of
  legendary proportions when someone does smuggle a quantity of booze
  into a dry village. 

  Nunam Iqua’s mayor and many of the tribal elders were in Fairbanks last
  week for a conference of the Alaska Federation of Natives.  They
  returned to find a village in shock and outrage.  Some villagers
  there want to be assured that Angelo Sugar will never come back. 
  My thinking is they might be better served by raising the funds for
  some enforcement of their liquor laws, and to have a VPSO on hand for
  the inevitable incidents when the illegal drinking gets out of hand.
  

  UPDATE:

  This hypothesis is, of course, a possibility:

  I suspect that the man was psychotic before he began drinking.

  Posted by HappyHeathen

  But I’d tend to think, given the locale and circumstances, that it’s not bloody likely.

  Early European invaders explorers and settlers observed
  how alcohol had extraordinary effects on Native Americans. 
  Basically, it was concluded that redskins just couldn’t handle
  firewater.  After the passage of a few centuries during which some
  white men got the Indians drunk on purpose to take advantage of them
  and others tried to deal with drunken Natives through the criminal
  justice and public health systems, geneticists discovered the reason
  for our extraordinary reactions to alcohol.  Yeah, I don’t look
  like a Native American on the surface, but I do have the bone
  structure, and under this red hair and these freckles I carry the same
  gene as most Asians and Native Americans that keeps us from
  metabolizing alcohol in the way that most Europeans do.

  We are missing a liver enzyme called “alcohol dehydrogenase.”  In
  our bodies, alcohol metabolizes into acetaldehyde and stays in that
  form.  It causes skin flushing and tingling, eats away at our
  stomachs and guts, and induces feelings of dysphoria.  A
  sufficient amount of alcohol doesn’t just destroy our higher brain
  functions and release inhibitions as it does for everyone, even those
  whose bodies do produce alcohol dehydrogenase.  It also causes
  nausea, pain and rage.

  This genetic peculiarity does nothing to prevent alcohol
  addiction.  Just like everyone else, prolonged consumption of
  alcohol depletes our dihomo gamma linolenic acid (DGLA, an essential
  fatty acid) so that our bodies eventually cannot produce the
  prostaglandin E1 (PGE1, a substance which promotes a feeling of
  well-being) which is our main payoff for drinking the poison in the
  first place. 

  When any body:  human, simian or lab rodent, reaches that state,
  it keeps craving and swilling more and more alcohol in the quest for
  that elusive PGE1.   Any drunk is pathetic and most, due to
  the relaxation of inhibitions and loss of judgement, are
  dangerous.  A drunk without alcohol dehyrogenase isn’t dangerous
  in only the usual ways, he or she has a big maddening burr under the
  saddle as well.

  Alaskan Native villagers who have elected to go “dry”, prohibiting
  alcohol within village boundaries, aren’t a bunch of moralistic prudes
  trying to keep people from having fun.  They are aware and
  concerned citizens trying to protect themselves from the plagues of
  alcohol-induced accidents, murders and suicides that have devastated
  their people since their first contacts with Europeans.

  In this particular case, I would suspect that if the man had been
  “psychotic” someone would have noticed and commented on it.  He
  had no reported history of mental illness as far as I could
  determine.  He was just another ordinary drunk.

  • 1:47 pm
  • 19 Comments