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He handed his wife a loaded gun. Now their families are fighting over who should raise their children.

The children were sleeping when their parents holed up in the garage for their last, worst fight. A babysitter heard yells that couldn't be masked even when someone turned up the music. Then the babysitter left and the gun came out.

Everything changed for the three McDonald kids that March night in Fairbanks three years ago.

Their father started a game of drunken Russian roulette where the outcome wasn't in question — he handed their mother a fully loaded gun.

Now she is dead, he is a convicted killer, and the remaining family is fighting in court over who should raise the children.

Should it be the Texas family of the children's father, John McDonald, who has served his time in Alaska prison and is on parole in Texas?

Or should it be the Alaska family of their late mother, Crystal Shannon McDonald, who was Yup'ik and had ties to the Southwestern Alaska village of Emmonak?

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled earlier this month on the side of Crystal's sister, Jessie Rice, reopening the child custody case and putting the father's violence and the children's Alaska Native heritage at the center of the discussion.

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"They are all we have left of her," said Rice, a 31-year-old mother of four who is pursuing her niece and nephews in court. "I want them to be safe and always protect them. I really want them to come home."

Messages left for McDonald and his sister, Rebecca Schimcek, who has had the children since his arrest in 2014, were not returned.

In court filings, Schimcek says the children are thriving and embraced by her family. She is a librarian working as a part-time teacher and her husband, Marty, is a sales representative for a Fortune 500 firm, Valero Energy Corp. They have three children of their own. In Texas, the McDonald children learned to ride bikes and swim. They have busy fun with swim team, scouts, mentorships, and other activities, Schimcek said in a court filing. They play in a clubhouse and jump on the neighbor's trampoline.

"We made certain they knew that our home was their home," Schimcek said in a sworn statement.

'The last time I saw her'

Back in 2004, Crystal Rice and John McDonald met at Alcoholics Anonymous in Anchorage, her sister said. For long stretches, both were sober.

The couple had two boys and a girl, now ages 6, 8 and 10.

John McDonald, who is now 41, worked at the Pogo Mine near Delta Junction, and Crystal stayed home to raise the children. She was unhappy in her marriage, according to what friends and family later told police.

In late February 2014, she came to Anchorage for a getaway and to take care of business. She had reconnected with an old boyfriend from East High School. During that visit, they began an affair, she confided to friends and family.

She wanted to get a lawyer, Rice said.

On March 1, Crystal McDonald showed up unannounced at Rice's home in Anchorage, a surprise for the birthday of Rice's son, Crystal's nephew.

Rice's photos from that Anchorage visit show her sister beaming.

"I didn't know that would be the last time I saw her," Rice said.

Drinking again

When Crystal McDonald returned to Fairbanks early that March, she followed a friend's advice and confided the affair to her husband.

They fought about it but John McDonald later told police they were trying to repair the relationship. Crystal told her friends and sister she thought it was over. A few days before she was killed, they got into a physical fight and she ended up bruised, her family said.

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On the night of March 19, 2014, the McDonalds went out to Bobby's Downtown, a popular restaurant in Fairbanks. They were drinking again. Crystal ordered three, four, five double Jack Daniels, depending on who was telling the story. John mainly was drinking beer, he said later. They stopped on the way home for a bottle of whiskey, John told police.

At the house, the babysitter and her boyfriend were just getting the children to bed. In the garage, Crystal passed out and John went inside and checked on the children. The babysitting couple left after the children fell asleep.

The McDonalds kept drinking. They talked more about how each had cheated on the other, he told police.

He unlocked the gun case and brought out his newly acquired Ruger .38 revolver.

Do you want to play Russian roulette? he asked her, as he later told police. He put in a round, spun the cylinder and pulled the trigger. It didn't fire. Then he put a round in all five chambers and handed the gun to his wife, he told police hours after the shooting.

Crystal put the gun under her chin and fired. She was 35 years old.

Who was to blame?

Just before 2 a.m. on March 20, 2014, John called 911 and reported that his wife had committed suicide in their garage.

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When officers arrived, they found a suspicious scene. He was standing in the driveway with his hands up. She was on the floor of the garage, shot through the chin.

"I never wanted this," he said, according to the Fairbanks police report. He talked about the argument, her drinking, her shooting herself. "I gotta talk to a lawyer, I guess," he said.

Investigators were unable to collect fingerprints from the gun because it was too oily but that is common, said one of the Fairbanks police detectives on the case, Peyton Merideth. From the gunshot angle, she pulled the trigger, but that doesn't mean she killed herself, he said.

"The evidence at the scene and the evidence that we discovered during the investigation supported that she was murdered," Merideth said. "The entire outcome of the case wasn't what we had hoped for."

On Aug. 1, 2014, John McDonald was arrested on charges of first-degree murder under the theory that he had induced her suicide. He also was charged with second-degree murder. Those charges were dismissed in 2015 after a judge threw out his statements to police. He was too drunk when police read him his rights soon after the killing, Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Bethany Harbison ruled. Police should have read him his rights again when he sobered up before having him walk through what happened, the judge said.

In April 2016, John pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of criminally negligent homicide and was sentenced to three years. He had been jailed since his arrest in 2014. Credited with time served, he was paroled July 31 and is under supervision in Texas, according to the Alaska Department of Corrections.

He is set to be released from parole July 1, a department spokesman said.

Dueling court cases

Crystal's family is worried he is living with, or near, the children and that he remains a danger.

His sister and her family live in a small town, the San Antonio suburb of Helotes.

Eight days after the killing, John signed over a limited power of attorney to his sister, giving her authority over the children. But he didn't lose custody until his arrest. Rice, Crystal's sister, said she was concerned for the children and reported suspicious bruises on the oldest boy to the state Office of Children's Services. After that, McDonald cut her off from talking with the kids, she said.

When he was arrested in August 2014, Rice asked OCS to collect the children from a neighbor, where she thought they would be.

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But they were already gone. A police detective found out they were going to live with the sister in Texas. Rice was in a panic.

"It took forever to find where they were," she said.

McDonald's family acted fast. On Sept. 4, 2014, the Schimceks along with the children's paternal grandparents petitioned a Texas court for custody.

The family said the children's mother was dead, the children needed health insurance, and that they resided in Texas.

The petition filed in Bexar County District Court didn't mention that John McDonald was jailed on a first-degree murder charge in the death. It also didn't mention that the children are Alaska Native.

In a ruling less than two weeks later, a Texas judge granted primary custody to the Schimceks.

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Meanwhile, that October, Rice went to court in Alaska to get the children. She represented herself at first, then temporarily was represented by a volunteer lawyer.

She flew to Texas but said Schimcek wouldn't let her see the children without a court order for visitation.

Rice was pushing for the case to be considered under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which aims to keep Native American children with Native families. She also raised concerns about the risk posed by the father.

The children are enrolled Emmonak tribal members, as was their maternal grandmother, according to the Rice family.

In December 2015, Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald gave the Texas court the power to decide the children's destiny. It was a more convenient forum, with so much information about the children's status coming out of Texas, he determined.

ICWA didn't apply unless the children were in state custody and the father wasn't an immediate risk since he was jailed, the judge said.

But the Alaska Supreme Court, in its unanimous March 3 opinion, said the judge's decision was a mistake, "an abuse of discretion."

The Fairbanks judge needs to look at the case again through the lens of ICWA, which governs all manner of custody cases with Native children, the Supreme Court said. The judge also needs to take into account that McDonald may be released — which already has happened — and that his family members failed to mention the murder charges when they filed for custody.

"Litigating custody in Texas would favor the paternal relatives, reducing the chance that the presiding court would investigate the allegations and protect the children," the Supreme Court said.

The justices didn't say in their decision if they heard from the children themselves.

A sister's promise

Now the custody question is back before the Fairbanks judge.

Rice said the children deserve to know their mother's family and culture, to share stories about her, to hear all the good things she wanted for them.

"I know how to make akutaq and fry bread and all the traditional foods like that," said Rice, who works as an executive assistant for the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association. She doesn't hunt but cousins bring her seal meat and muktuk from whale, moose and caribou that she cooks. Her family fishes and camps.

Rice and her children live with her father. They've bought a six-bedroom, four-bathroom house in Anchorage to have room for everyone. She's a Scout leader and a Sunday school teacher.

Rice represented herself to the Supreme Court, relying on legal arguments that her previous attorney had put together. She spent weeks to get it all on paper.

"I was praying for the best and hoping that it worked and it did."

Maybe, she said, another lawyer will step up to help her continue the court fight. She said the sisters promised to take care of each other's children if something happened. She hasn't given up on her end of that.

Lisa Demer

Lisa Demer was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Dispatch News. Among her many assignments, she spent three years based in Bethel as the newspaper's western Alaska correspondent. She left the ADN in 2018.

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