Anchorage Daily News

A 22-year-old Alaskan, caught in the deadly crossfire between Russia and Georgia over the weekend, is apparently alive and being treated in a Russian hospital.

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Winston Featherly-Bean, a 2004 graduate of West High School, was among four journalists shot by combatants in a separatist enclave of northern Georgia on Sunday, according to reports by Russian news agencies. Two of the journalists were killed.

Featherly-Bean, editor of a small English-language newspaper in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, was shot in the leg while riding in a vehicle with three other reporters in the strife-torn region of South Ossetia — where Georgians, invading Russians and local Georgian separatists (loyal to Russia) have been engaged in battle since Friday.

Featherly-Bean was taken first to a field hospital in the provincial capital of Tskhinvali, then transferred by Russian medics to a larger hospital in Vladikavkaz in southern Russia.

His parents, Walter Featherly in Anchorage and Christine Bean in Girdwood, spent Sunday desperately trying to contact their son and determine his whereabouts after hearing Internet reports of the shooting. On Monday, the U.S. State Department — relaying information from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow — told Featherly that his son was currently a patient in the Vladikavkaz hospital and his condition was “satisfactory.” Efforts to phone the hospital and talk to doctors there haven’t yet succeeded, he said. A post-injury video interview with Featherly-Bean by a Russian news agency showed him sitting up in a hospital bed, sounding subdued and dazed. The interview begins with Featherly-Bean speaking English. “After we got shot …” he said on camera.

The TV station then translated the rest of his words into Russian. His mother was able to get a family acquaintance to translate them back into English. In that version, Featherly-Bean allegedly says: “They fired (at) us. … I remember nothing. With us there was the photographer and one additional journalist. They were killed. I cannot accurately say what agency they (worked for).”

According to the Reporters Without Borders organization, a journalist with the Russian edition of Newsweek identified the two dead reporters as Grigol Chikhladze, a Tbilisi-based TV journalist working for Newsweek, and photojournalist Alexander Klimchuk, a correspondent for Itar-Tas.

“They were travelling at the time in a privately-owned car with U.S. reporter Winston (Featherly-Bean) and fellow Georgian reporter Teimuraz Kikuradze,” the organization reported online.

“When the car tried to avoid a roadblock erected by Ossetian pro-independence fighters, the Ossetians opened fire, killing Chikhladze and Klimchuk and wounding Kikuradze and (Featherly-Bean), who were taken to a field hospital in Tskhinvali.”

“We still don’t know what his real true condition is,” Christine Bean said Monday. “Because nobody has actually seen him or talked to him or talked to his doctor in person.”

Since he graduated from high school in Anchorage four years ago, Featherly-Bean has traveled widely across Asia and Europe, writing and working odd jobs, Bean said. In early 2005 he was in Southeast Asia, where he witnessed the devastating tsunami that hit Indonensia and wrote about it for the Daily News.

Last summer he was hired as editor of The Messenger in Tbilisi. His father visited him there last October. “I think he enjoyed the job at the newspaper because of his remarkable language and writing skills,” Featherly said. “He developed a great interest in regional political and economic affairs.”

Before departing his office in Tbilisi on Friday, Featherly-Bean e-mailed the Daily News in Anchorage to ask if the newspaper would be interested in stories by him from the war zone.

“The (Georgia) government has launched a major offensive to retake the secessionist region of South Ossetia, and it risks developing into a full-blown war in the South Causcasus,” he wrote.

After Friday, Featherley-Bean’s posts on The Messenger Web site stopped. But a comment thread continues to receive messages, asking about his status.

“We understand Winston was sent to Vladikavkaz for surgery, but does anyone know about his current condition?” one anonymous poster wrote Monday.

Find George Bryson online at adn.com/contact/gbryson or call 257-4318.