Juneau police investigate reports of campaign sign thefts linked to Assembly candidate’s truck

One Juneau woman said she found a campaign sign sprouting from her yard supporting a local candidate she opposes.

A man driving through the same neighborhood said he saw a woman stealing a pair of signs, one of which advertised the campaign of Juneau Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl, who's up for re-election next month.

In the middle of it all: a pickup, with a crab pot in the back, that belongs to one of Kiehl's opponents, Loretto Jones, according to the Juneau Empire.

Jones said in a brief phone interview Thursday that she hadn't taken any of Kiehl's signs and was actually replacing them after someone else uprooted them.

"I don't know where this is coming from, and frankly I've put it behind me," Jones said. She added, before hanging up: "Case closed."

But Jonathan Wood, who spotted Jones' truck Monday, isn't convinced.

"I'm not here to call people a liar. But I know what I saw and she wasn't fixing a sign that had fallen over or anything like that," Wood said. "That's a totally bogus line and if that's what she told the police, it's not true."

Wood said he saw the truck on his lunch break, when he was driving through Juneau's Flats neighborhood to find a friend's house — he was supposed to drop off a check later in the day to pay his share of a camper van rental from last weekend's popular Klondike Road Relay, a Southeast running race.

As he drove around a Toyota pickup stopped in the middle of the road, Wood said, he saw the woman who'd gotten out. She was in a yard on the corner, "wiggling a sign back and forth, obviously trying to pull it out of the ground."

Meanwhile, according to a detailed chronicle of the episode by the Empire, another woman, Brenda Knapp, arrived at her nearby home to find a silver pickup in her driveway.

"When the truck pulled away, Knapp noticed that three of the four campaign signs in her yard were missing," the Empire reported. In their place was one for Jones.

Knapp and Wood both reported the truck's license plate to authorities. Police matched it to a truck whose owner they declined to name, though police spokesman Dave Campbell acknowledged that she's "associated with one of our local Assembly campaigns."

An officer talked to the vehicle's owner the next day, who acknowledged being in the area putting up signs. But she denied taking any down, Campbell said.

No charges were filed.

"The officer wasn't able to make any kind of connection that the person he contacted actually stole the signs," Campbell said. It would be accurate, he added, to say that "we just took her word."

Kiehl, Jones' opponent, said he had to replace signs missing from four different places earlier this week after someone warned him that they were being taken down. But he declined to take a firm stance on whether Jones was responsible.

"It happens every campaign season and it's a shame," he said. "But signs don't vote, so I campaign to people."

He added: "As long as the sign-swiping stops, we're good."