David is a first year Driver/ Leader for Midnight Sun Tours. He has been posted to Alaksa for the summer. His adventure will last a total of 97 days.

Monday, June 07, 2004

McCarthy Massacre- McCarthy AK 1983

I will be spending a total of 11 days in the town of McCarthy, current population of 42, over the course of my summer.

McCARTHY, Alaska, March 2 - An unemployed computer programmer has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths Tuesday of six of the 22 residents of this snowbound back-country village.

Louis D. Hastings, 39 years old, was also charged with one count of assault in the first degree at his arraignment today in Anchorage. Mr. Hastings, who was being held in $300,000 bond, did not enter a plea. The authorities said they had no clue as to what prompted the shootings.

Christopher Richards, one of the injured survivors, told the police he vividly remembered the words of the man who shot him: "'look you're already dead. If you'll just quit fighting, I'll make it easy for you.'"

Instead, the 29-year-old Mr. Richards said, he grabbed a knife, slashed his assailant and fled in his stocking feet into the snow.

Safety 100 Miles Away

He was picked up by a neighbor on a snowmobile and taken to an airstrip in this old mining community in the Wrangell Mountains 225 miles east of Anchorage. McCarthy is inaccessible by road in the winter and has no telephone service.

A private pilot flew Mr. Richards 100 miles north-west to Glennallen, where the state troopers were told of the shootings. Officers flew to here and arrested Mr. Hastings, who was on a snowmobile 20 miles from McCarthy. They said he had offered no resistance but declined to say whether he was armed.

Mr. Hastings was treated at Faith Hospital in Glennallen for cuts, which Trooper Ken Lewis said appeared to be knife wounds.

Mr. Hastings told a magistrate he had been living in a house he owns near McCarthy for eight months. State troopers said he apparently was last employed three years ago in California.

State troopers, who declined to identify the dead, today began preparing to remove the victims. Three bodies were alongside a snow-covered airstrip on a bluff overlooking McCarthy.

Three of the dead lay under a bright orange tarpaulin about 50 yards outside a house where they were found.

"There was a lot of shooting that went on inside that house," said Capt. Jim Landsberry. "There were a lot of bullets sprayed around."

Woman Was Also Injured

Donna Byram, 32 years old, was injured along with Mr. Richards, but the authorities would not allow her to be interviewed.

From his hospital bed, Mr. Richards said that the gunman had shot him "completely out of the blue." He described how the attack occurred after he invited the gunman into his cabin for a cup of coffee.

As he reached for a cup, Mr. Richards said, he felt something hit him near the right eye and realized he had been shot. Another bullet hit him in the neck, he said, and then he heard the man tell him not to fight.

At one time, McCarthy was home to 1,00 people. Gold was the discovered in the area at the turn of the century, and until 1938 the Kennecott Copper Company operated a mine about six miles from the village.

You can check out the whole story at http://influx.uoregon.edu/1998/mccarthy/

11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope he was executed in the most painful way with no mercy.

10:55 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope somebody kills his ass while he's doing his time

11:29 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Matter fact i hope he gets tortured that son of a bitch

11:30 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That muthfucker needs to be tortured for real

11:33 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gimme 5 mins with that boy

11:45 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

WHY ?

1:54 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I want to know why he snapped! I watch a show about this last night on the discovery channel. they never said why he did it. but he did want to kill everyone

5:31 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's right kill em all stop wasting peoples money keeping them alive. You choose to kill so be killed.

3:09 PM

 
Blogger Unknown said...

There is a rumor, I do not know whether or not it is true, but he planned to blow up the oil pipes in McCarthy, and wanted no witnesses, and what better way to leave no witnesses than to take out the village.

7:50 AM

 
Blogger Unknown said...

There is a rumor, I do not know whether or not it is true, but he planned to blow up the oil pipes in McCarthy, and wanted no witnesses, and what better way to leave no witnesses than to take out the village.

7:51 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...


He was angry about development and his plan was to steal a plane, fly to the oil pipeline ( don't know if he was a licensed pilot ) set the plane to take off without him, steal a fuel truck, crash it into the pipe line, die in the expected fire.

It seems like so many killers, don't really think things through and end up with failures. For example, in this case...how long would it take for the damage to be repaired ?

6:17 PM

 

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