Evan Ramsey was 16 years old on the morning of February 19, 1997, when he killed two people in Bethel, an isolated town of about 4,700 people on the Alaska tundra. The dead were Josh Palacios, a schoolmate, and Ron Edwards, the school's principal. Two other pupils were wounded. Bethel police took Ramsey into custody within minutes, and he has been held by the state ever since.
A jury in the Superior Court for the Fourth Judicial District at Bethel convicted him in 1998 of two counts of murder in the first degree, one count of attempted murder in the first degree and fifteen counts of assault in the third degree. It acquitted him of two further counts of attempted first-degree murder and one count of third-degree assault. The trial judge imposed a composite term of 210 years. In 2002 the Court of Appeals of Alaska reversed the attempted-murder conviction, holding that the jury had been wrongly instructed on the intent the crime requires. On remand the State accepted a conviction for assault in the second degree in its place, and the judge resentenced Ramsey to 198 years: the maximum 99-year term for each murder, to be served one after the other. The Court of Appeals affirmed that sentence in 2005.
The case left a second mark on Alaska law. Ramsey had told friends what he meant to do, and for days no one warned the school or the police. One of those friends was later found delinquent on two counts of second-degree murder, and in 2003 the same appeals court reversed that adjudication in a ruling on how the conduct of a young person should be judged.
Because Ramsey was a juvenile, police did not release his name that day. He had spent years in foster care before coming to live with a foster family in Bethel.
The schoolmate was remembered by those who knew him as a gregarious and popular teenager, one of the best-liked young people in the school.
The principal had led the Bethel school for four years. Pupils described him as stern but kind.
Ramsey did not keep his plan secret. In the days before February 19, he told at least two close friends that he could no longer control his anger, and he asked one of them for help and the other for advice. Word passed from those friends to other pupils. On the morning itself a group of pupils had been told that something big was going to happen, and some of them seem to have understood what that meant. None of them went to school staff or to the police.
Ramsey later said his friends had urged him on. In an interview published in 2001 he said he wished one of them had reported him, and called that one of the best things a person could have done. Both friends were brought before the courts in juvenile proceedings, and by 1999 both had been tried and sentenced as juveniles, with release expected when each reached 19.
Bethel police officers reached the school within minutes, and Ramsey surrendered to them. He was booked into jail, where a Department of Corrections health worker carried out the routine intake screening that every new prisoner received. During that screening, and again in a second interview at the jail's medical center, he said he had had no suicidal thoughts within the past year. She referred him to a mental health clinician anyway, because of his age and the gravity of the charges.
His friends' cases went through delinquency proceedings in the juvenile system. Ramsey's did not. He was indicted in the Superior Court at Bethel under trial court number 4BE-S97-0167 CR, and he stood trial before a jury on charges of murder in the first degree, attempted murder in the first degree and assault in the third degree.
The facts of what happened were not seriously in dispute. The contest was over his state of mind. Ramsey's defense was that he had gone to the school wanting to die, and that he never formed the intent to kill that first-degree murder requires. His lawyers argued that he had wanted to frighten people and to force police officers to end his life.
To support that account, the defense asked to put before the jury his family history and evidence of abuse he had suffered as a younger child in one foster placement. The trial judge allowed a substantial amount of background evidence.
The judge drew a line at the abuse evidence. He ruled that Ramsey could introduce it only if an expert explained why such abuse would tend to make a child suicidal rather than homicidal; without that foundation, he found, the risk of distracting the jury outweighed the evidence's value. The defense maintained that the link was obvious and called no expert. The judge also reminded the parties that the State had to prove intent to kill others, and that a wish to die as well was no defense: under Alaska law, intent to cause a result need not be a person's only objective.
In rebuttal, the State called the corrections health worker, who told the jury that Ramsey had denied any recent suicidal thoughts at his intake screening. The jury also had a handwritten letter in which Ramsey said he had told people what he planned to do, named the principal among those he was angry with, and wrote that he expected to die himself.
The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree attempted murder and fifteen counts of third-degree assault, and acquitted him on three other counts. At his sentencing early in 1999 Ramsey told the court, "I'm so sorry." The judge imposed a composite term of 210 years.
Ramsey appealed both his convictions and his sentence, and on October 11, 2002, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals of Alaska issued its opinion, Ramsey v. State, No. 1832.
The court first upheld the ruling on the abuse evidence. The question, it said, was whether the trial judge had abused his discretion in demanding expert testimony for the premise that abuse would push a child toward suicide and away from violence against others. "We hold that reasonable judges could conclude that this premise was not self-evident," the court wrote, so the requirement was within the judge's discretion. The record showed that Ramsey had been able to present a good deal about his background in any case.
The court next rejected his claim that his statements at intake were protected by the psychotherapist-patient privilege of Alaska Evidence Rule 504. The privilege covers only confidential communications, and the test is whether the person reasonably believed the conversation would stay private. The court held that a reasonable person in his position would not have thought so: the purpose of the questions was to find out whether he was a suicide risk, and any warning sign would have been passed to the officers guarding him. The health worker's testimony was properly admitted.
On the third issue Ramsey won. The State had charged him with the attempted first-degree murder of one of the two wounded pupils, on the theory that intent to kill one person, together with injury to another, made out attempted murder of the second. The trial judge accepted that theory, instructed the jury on it, and barred the defense from arguing that the jury had to find a specific intent to kill the wounded pupil.
The appeals court found the theory unsound. Alaska's first-degree murder statute makes a person guilty of murder for any death caused with intent to kill, so no doctrine of transferred intent is needed for the murder counts. Attempt is different. The problem with the State's argument, the court wrote, "is that its logic leads to the conclusion that Ramsey could have been found guilty of the attempted murder of everyone in the school." The proper course was to assess each injured person separately: an injured bystander could support a homicide, an attempted homicide or an assault charge, depending on Ramsey's mental state toward that person. Because the jury had never been asked whether he meant to kill the wounded pupil, the conviction could not stand.
The court declined the State's request to substitute first-degree assault, because the record did not establish that the jury had found serious physical injury. It held that the State was entitled either to a verdict of assault in the second degree or to a retrial for attempted murder or any lesser offense. It did not reach Ramsey's argument that the judge had misunderstood when he would become eligible for parole, since he would have to be resentenced in any event. "Ramsey's conviction for attempted murder in the first degree is REVERSED," the opinion concluded. "His other convictions are AFFIRMED."
The friend who had helped Ramsey prepare was the subject of a petition for an adjudication of delinquency. The State's theory was that he had taught Ramsey what he needed to know, urged him to carry out his plan and encouraged others not to interfere. A jury found him delinquent on two counts of second-degree murder on the theory that he had knowingly engaged in conduct manifesting an extreme indifference to the value of human life.
His defense was that he believed Ramsey was only bragging and had answered in kind. The trial judge told the jury to measure his recklessness against the standard of a reasonable adult, reasoning that the subject matter made it an adult activity. On January 31, 2003, the Court of Appeals reversed. The central dispute, it said, was whether the young man knew or should have known that Ramsey would go beyond words, and the jury should have measured that against the care reasonably expected of a person of his own age, intelligence and experience. Holding young people to an adult standard for conversations that end in someone else's crime, the court warned, would be a broad and major change in the law. Both delinquency findings were set aside.
On remand the State chose not to retry the attempted-murder count and asked the court to enter a verdict of assault in the second degree. At resentencing the trial judge again imposed the maximum 99-year term for each count of first-degree murder, again ran them consecutively, and made every assault sentence concurrent. The composite term fell from 210 years to 198.
Ramsey appealed once more, arguing that the sentence was excessive. He pointed to his youth, to the stress he had been under, to the remorse he had shown and to his progress during his years in custody. He relied on the rule from the Alaska Supreme Court's decisions in Neal and Mutschler, which requires a sentencing judge who stacks sentences beyond the maximum for any single count to find that the combined term is necessary to protect the public.
The Court of Appeals affirmed on June 15, 2005. The trial judge had addressed that rule directly and had made the required finding, after weighing both Ramsey's age and the progress he had made. A sentence longer than 99 years, the court said, should be imposed only in an exceptional case in which the trial court concludes that the defendant must spend the rest of his life in prison, and it held that the record supported that conclusion in Ramsey's case. A concurring judge added that Ramsey was not barred from attacking the length of his sentence merely because he had not done so in his first appeal, since the reversal of the attempted-murder count would have made such an attack moot at the time.
Ramsey has spoken to reporters several times from custody. In a television interview broadcast in 1999 he said he had gone to the school meaning to end his own life, and predicted that he would soon be forgotten. In 2001, held in Alaska, he said he had been picked on at school and wished he had known then what he knew later.
In 2008 he was interviewed in Arizona, where he was then held. He told the interviewers that at the time he had not understood that the people he harmed would not get up again, and he described how friends who knew of his plan had encouraged him rather than raising the alarm. In 2024 he was still serving the 198-year sentence in custody. He will become eligible for discretionary parole in 2066.
Three rules of Alaska law shaped the outcome. The first is the statute on intent: when causing a result is an element of a crime, that intent need not be the defendant's only objective, which is why the trial judge treated Ramsey's own wish to die as no answer to the murder charges. The second is the Neal and Mutschler rule on consecutive sentences, under which a term longer than the maximum for any one count requires a finding that the combined term is needed to protect the public; the Court of Appeals added that a sentence over 99 years belongs only in an exceptional case where the defendant must spend the rest of his life in prison. The third is parole eligibility. Ramsey's lawyers argued in 2002 that he could not seek discretionary parole until he had served one-third of his sentence, not one-quarter as the judge appeared to assume, and the sentence of 198 years puts his eligibility in 2066.
The central question at trial, whether Ramsey meant to kill or meant to die, was decided by the jury against him on both counts of first-degree murder, and the appeals court upheld those convictions. His later descriptions of his motives come from interviews given years afterward and were never tested in court.
His account that friends urged him on is his own. The delinquency findings against the friend who helped him prepare were reversed in 2003, so that friend's legal responsibility for the deaths was never finally established.
February 19, 1997: Josh Palacios and Ron Edwards are killed in Bethel; Ramsey is taken into custody by Bethel police.
1997: Indictment in the Superior Court, Fourth Judicial District, Bethel (No. 4BE-S97-0167 CR); the two friends' cases proceed in juvenile court.
1998: The jury convicts Ramsey of two counts of first-degree murder, one of first-degree attempted murder and fifteen of third-degree assault, and acquits him on three counts.
Early 1999: Sentenced to a composite term of 210 years; he tells the court he is sorry.
October 11, 2002: The Court of Appeals reverses the attempted-murder conviction, affirms the rest and orders resentencing.
January 31, 2003: The Court of Appeals reverses the delinquency findings against one of the friends.
On remand: The State elects a verdict of second-degree assault; Ramsey is resentenced to 198 years.
June 15, 2005: The Court of Appeals affirms the 198-year sentence.
2008: Interviewed in custody in Arizona.
2066: First eligibility for discretionary parole.