Families Who Escaped From Lower 48 Often Find Violent Dead End In Alaska

ANCHORAGE - These wide, windy streets seemed a long way from California - and in their panorama of fast-food restaurants, low-rise bank buildings and stands of leafy alder, a lot cleaner.

Bouamy Phiachantharath had worried about his boys in Fresno, Calif., where the family settled after leaving Laos in 1985. Chansy, a wispy teenager with a wise mouth and a passion for fast cars, seemed a perfect candidate for the kind of trouble that was almost worse than the corruption and war they had left behind.

"Living that way, the family saw too much violence, such as gangs, shootings and stealing," Phiachantharath wrote in a family biography that tried to explain why he, his wife and five of his seven children got on a plane and flew to Alaska, the farthest place from Fresno he knew, on July 13, 1991. "The parents," he explained, "did not want to see them grow up in a bad way."

Helen Byrd had a similar epiphany. Her son Sylvester, now 19, appeared headed for trouble in Houston. She had heard Alaska was a fresh place where she could find a good-paying job and Sylvester could stay safe.

"My oldest girl had been trying to get me to come up. She told me, `Mom, we don't have all that stuff up here like in Houston.' You know, drive-bys and all that stuff," Byrd said. So she and Sylvester took off for Alaska on Nov. 10, 1994. They got an apartment and jobs at Kmart.

These are America's new frontier families. And like a growing number who have fled the heartaches of home for a new life, they came to grief in a land that has become a melting pot of the nation's dispossessed.

In the chilly hours before dawn on July 12, authorities say, Sylvester Byrd pulled up beside Chansy Phiachantharath's car on a deserted downtown boulevard, leveled a 9-mm handgun at the window and fired until it was empty.

Chansy's body was left in the street, tossed out by his friends. Sylvester was swept off to prison, although he claimed: "It didn't happen the way they say," and faces up to 129 years if convicted of the killing. And two sets of parents who had ventured to Alaska to find clean starts instead found a new outpost of urban fear.

"A lot of people came here from down in California 'cause they wanted to get away from trouble. But I think there's nowhere or no place you can go to hide anymore," Cathy Ramos, a 16-year-old Service High School junior, said at a recent gathering for Chansy - one day after another murdered classmate's funeral.

Chansy's death was only the beginning of a year of violence in Anchorage that has left six teenagers dead, several others wounded, and one of the city's poorest neighborhoods at a slow boil. Residents of north Anchorage's Mountain View district, on the verge of rioting at one point this summer, have demanded more police patrols and curbs on guns in the schools - pleas hollowly familiar in the cities many left behind.

Authorities and social analysts say stories like the Byrd and Phiachantharath families' are common in Alaska, where all manner of refugees arrive from across the nation - often leaving behind failed marriages, lost jobs and general disillusionment, and bringing hopes for a new start.

"We have a lot of what we call end-of-the-roaders. Often, they're trying to escape something. Sometimes it's a record of crime outside, sometimes it's a bad marriage, sometimes they just don't fit in," said Judith Kleinfeld, director of the northern-studies program at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

A paradoxical place

The result, she said, is "this odd paradox in the north of, on the one hand, it being a very safe place and a lot of people don't lock their doors at night. And on the other hand, the number of . . . killers who go and shoot up a place (here) is very, very high."

Both the Byrds and the Phiachantharaths had feared gang violence at home. Anchorage homicide Detective Sgt. Mike Grimes said it is often the very families who came here to escape such violence who bring the seeds of it with them.

"People get the idea of coming to Alaska to start over. Consequently, they end up in Alaska, and Alaska ends up with all the attendant problems of a melting pot, maybe even worse," Grimes said. "We have large numbers of Filipinos, Koreans, people from the Chinese community, the African-American community. We're finding that the Asian immigrants that initially sort of saturated California are moving farther north, so in the last couple of years we've seen Laotians, Cambodians."

Asians now make up 4.8 percent of Anchorage's population, compared with 6.4 percent for blacks. Until recent years, the population had been mainly native tribal people and white immigrants.

It is the newer immigrants of all colors who largely have been responsible for introducing gang habits in Anchorage, police say.

"We get some of these kids that have already been exposed to the gang and crime problems outside, and basically they come up here, and they're right at home all over again," Grimes said.

Perhaps few should have been surprised, then, when Chansy became one of three Service High students to die this summer. Helen Byrd says she had a strange feeling when she read about the 17-year-old junior getting shot, even before she knew her son would be charged with the murder.

"My heart just went out to them," she said. "I saw (Chansy's mother) on TV, and I wanted to go up and grab her and try to comfort her. Because she lost a child. And I'm losing mine."

From the start, Chansy's wisecracking ways and open adoration of girls eased him into Service High, where he was one of the most popular students in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program.

Despite working late at a grocery to help support his family, then often cruising in his low-rider car into the early morning, Chansy showed up lively and joking for classes every day - to the consternation of his teachers.

"Sometimes he would bend the rules or step over the line and you just couldn't stay mad at him. He would give you that smile. And what can you do against Chansy's smile?" said ESL teacher Cathy Coulter. "He was a big personality. He was just huge."

It was Chansy, the youngest son, whom Bouamy and his wife, Pheng, depended on to help with errands and to take Bouamy to the hospital for his heart problems.

"I think the family really saw him as the ticket," said another of Chansy's teachers. "He didn't have an accent, and he also had this incredible charm. They saw he was going to be the star."

Yet, like many high-school students, Chansy flirted with trouble. His grades slipped during his freshman year when he was spending more time cruising. A friend who was having trouble at home moved in with Chansy's family. The friend subsequently was arrested on charges of gunning down an Air Force airman.

"We were absolutely sure that he was faced on a daily basis with gang people talking to him. But he didn't want to be involved," Coulter said. His grades picked up to A's and B's last year, she said. "I really think he was going to be the leader to show the other immigrant kids how to achieve."

In his journals, Chansy said he was "trying to stay out of trouble and keep my grades up." It wasn't easy. "I am having some problems with a lot of kids, and I am trying to solve it without starting any trouble," he wrote. "But if they start it, I have to end it."

"Extreme anger"

Looking back, those close to him wonder if that had anything to do with what happened when Chansy and three friends headed out for breakfast July 12. It was 4 a.m.

The way his friends described it to police, they saw a carload of youths apparently vandalizing a parked truck. They threw rocks at the youths and gave chase by car, but lost them.

Byrd was one of the youths. Abandoned when his friends sped off, Byrd and another friend known as "Psycho Dan" were picked up later by several teenagers in a white van. When they came upon Chansy's car, police say, Byrd aimed his gun at the driver's window and fired repeatedly, hitting Chansy in the head.

The friends told police they stopped the car, pulled Chansy's body onto the pavement and sped off toward the hospital, inadvertently driving over both of his legs.

In his confession, Byrd described his "extreme anger" and admitted that he shot at the driver's window "without any justification whatsoever." He said he and his friends went back to his apartment and watched a video movie.

Although there were seven others in the van that night with Byrd, none of them came forward, and Grimes, the Anchorage homicide officer, worked a string of 20-hour days to try to solve the killing. He eventually broke the case using secretly taped conversations between Byrd and the owner of the white van.

"The thing that was so symptomatic of what's going on here is there were eight kids in that van. It was all over the papers that this 17-year-old had been shot, and not one of them came forward," Grimes said. " . . . The taking of a human life has so little impact on these kids that none of them would pick up the phone and let us know. . . . I'm not sure they even care."