Crime & Courts

Juneau police name officer and unarmed man he shot, but say little else about confrontation

Juneau police on Monday named the officer and the 38-year-old man they said he shot over the weekend, but had little else to say about the violent confrontation between the men at a car wreck west of town.

Police said Sgt. Chris Gifford shot Jeremie Shaun Tinney of Juneau around 4:30 a.m. Saturday while responding to a report of a car crash. Tinney was unarmed, police said, and survived the shooting.

Tinney had failed to comply with officer instructions, according to police. Juneau Police Department Lt. David Campbell said Monday that additional details remained under investigation.

"We are investigating everything that led up to the incident," he said. "There's lots of pieces to this investigation that we're putting together."

Campbell said the police department was working closely with the district attorney's office and the Alaska Bureau of Investigation "to make sure the most thorough investigation gets done so we can say exactly what happened."

Police said officers' interaction with Tinney started Saturday around 12:56 a.m. A police officer tried to stop a gray Jeep Cherokee for speeding near the intersection of Egan Drive and Mendenhall Loop Road, just northwest of Juneau International Airport. The car did not stop and police did not pursue it, in line with department policy, Campbell said.

"Because pursuits are so inherently dangerous — and it's been proven across the country — our policy is that unless we are dealing with a violent felony that has immediate harm to the public, we will not pursue people," Campbell said. "Juneau is a small enough town and we deal with the same people over and over again, you get a plate number and contact them later."

ADVERTISEMENT

Around 3:55 a.m. Saturday, police said they received a call from a Juneau resident who said her husband had called her and said he was in a crash "somewhere out the road." Her husband, a 42-year-old Juneau resident, was the passenger in the car and would not tell his wife the name of the driver, according to a police statement Saturday.

Campbell said that around the same time early Saturday, police received another call from a Juneau resident who said there was a man in her driveway and it looked like he had been in a crash. (Campbell said the man was on foot and was a passenger in Tinney's Jeep. He was the 42-year-old man who had called his wife about the crash.)

Two police officers responded to the area and found a gray Jeep Cherokee off the road and in the trees, on the 16500 block of Ocean View Drive, Campbell said. The Jeep was the same car that police had tried to pull over earlier in the night, roughly 7 miles away.

Police said the two officers located the Jeep around 4:19 a.m. Saturday. The sergeant told police dispatch the driver was not complying with officer instruction and was barricaded in the car. Within one minute, police requested medical assistance for the Jeep's driver who had been shot once by one of the officers, according to a police statement.

Campbell said he could not provide information Monday about how Tinney barricaded himself in the car or where on his body he was shot.

On Monday, police identified the two officers at the scene as Gifford, who has worked at the department for more than 16 years, and officer Darin Schultz, who has worked for the department for more than 19 years. Both men were placed on administrative leave under department policy, Campbell said.

They remained on leave Monday. The police chief will determine when Gifford and Schultz can return to duty, he said.

Tinney was flown to Seattle Saturday with injuries that police said were not life threatening. Tinney was released from Harborview Medical Center on Sunday. He was then arrested by the Washington State Patrol on an outstanding warrant, according to Jeremy Barclay, a spokesman for Washington's prisons.

The Washington arrest warrant, for failure to report and for contacting a victim, dates back years, Barclay said. The underlying charges for the arrest warrant were third-degree assault on a child, fourth-degree assault, harassment and a probation violation, according to Juneau police.

In Juneau, Tinney's criminal history includes convictions in 2013 on an assault charge, in 2011 on disorderly conduct charges and in 2009 on assault and disorderly conduct charges, according to court records.

Police said Saturday that Tinney was known to Juneau officers and was the subject of an "officer safety warning" due to threats he made in the past about harming officers. Campbell said those threats were from about four years ago but police were not releasing the nature of those threats.

Tegan Hanlon

Tegan Hanlon was a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News between 2013 and 2019. She now reports for Alaska Public Media.

ADVERTISEMENT