Alaska News

Bethel man pleads guilty to sexually abusing 12 girls

BETHEL -- A 66-year-old Bethel man admitted in court Sunday to sexually abusing a dozen girls over a period of five years and will face sentencing in March, according to Bethel's district attorney.

Daniel S. Kashatok was scheduled to stand trial this week in Bethel on 22 counts of sexual abuse or attempted sexual abuse of young girls.

He pleaded guilty to two consolidated counts -- one charge of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor and one of attempted second-degree sexual abuse -- that wrapped in all the victims and spared the girls and their families the pain of a trial, said District Attorney June Stein.

"Everyone is just thrilled and relieved," Stein said Monday after contacting all the victims' families.

Some of the molestations involved girls who were friends with his daughters and came to his home for sleepovers, Stein said. Others happened at his workplace. He was a janitor in the Bethel Native Corp. complex in Bethel's town center. He was accused of touching girls' breasts or genitals and once of making a girl touch him, Stein said. None of the allegations involved sexual penetration, she said.

"These are not red-flag cases," Stein said.

He abused the first girl in the summer of 2006 and the last one in February 2011, according to a criminal complaint filed in Bethel Superior Court. One girl complained to authorities in 2009 that Kashatok had touched her -- almost as an aside during an investigation about other allegations -- but her report couldn't be verified, Stein said.

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Then in 2010 girls began coming forward, one after another. One told her school principal. Another reported it to her guidance counselor. One revealed it to the leader of the Teens Acting Against Violence program, Stein said.

Over months, investigators pieced together the extent of the abuse, Stein said. Some disclosures were made to Bethel police investigators, others to the Bethel child advocacy center. In January 2012, Kashatok was charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse and has been jailed ever since.

He has a long history of trouble with a 10-year-old felony bootlegging conviction, numerous long-ago offenses related to alcohol and one earlier sexual crime. But no one alleged that drinking was a factor in the recent sex cases, the district attorney said.

One of the girls, who was molested back in 2007, never dealt with the trauma of being abused, her mother said Monday.

Two years ago this Saturday, the girl, then 16, died suddenly in Bethel. She got caught up with others drinking and Bethel police said she died from alcohol poisoning, according to her mother. Alaska Dispatch News does not routinely identify victims of sexual abuse.

The girl was a school friend of Kashatok's oldest daughter and spent the night at their house. He came across as a loving and caring father, the girl's mother said.

"Behind the doors, I never realized he was such a monster after all. He never betrayed that," she said. "He seemed normal." Now she sees him differently, "a Jekyll and Hyde person."

He was raising his girls as a single father for much of that time. Brenda Evans, the mother of some of his daughters, now is in prison herself, serving a 22-year sentence for killing her boyfriend in 2012.

The plea deal is significant to families, an end and a relief, the girl's mother said. At a trial, he would have been "lying to himself," she said.

The daughter who died began drinking and using drugs when she was young. She went to residential treatment in Fairbanks. She was better after that but didn't stay away from alcohol entirely. The mother said she'll never know if the sexual abuse ate away at her child or if something else was hurting her.

Victims of abuse need to come forward, as hard as it is, she said. She's heard adults speak of deep trauma from just one incident years earlier.

"Please don't hold anything back," she said. "By holding back, they tend to go through so more much grief."

The guilty plea came together quickly over the weekend. Kashatok's defense attorney, Brendan Kelley, on Saturday approached Stein, who agreed he could plead to two charges provided the hearing could be done Sunday before victims began gathering in Bethel for the trial. The district attorney was trying the case herself. Kashatok had backed out of an earlier agreement to plead to the charges, Stein said.

Sentencing is set for March 27. The plea did not include a sentencing agreement, Stein said. The likely sentence for sexual abuse of a minor is in the range of 20 to 35 years in prison, based on the charges and various factors, she said. The attempted sexual abuse count carries less time.

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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