Early on October 11, 1997, 15-year-old John Gilbert Hartman was found beaten and unconscious on a street in Fairbanks, Alaska. He soon died, and four suspects were quickly rounded up and accused of the crime: 19-year-old Marvin Roberts, 17-year-old Eugene Vent, 20-year-old George Frese and 19-year-old Kevin Pease. In a case eerily similar to that of the exonerated Central Park Five, police coerced confessions out of two of the young men, and all four—who were of Alaska Native and Native American descent—were convicted of murder. Two of the boys were drunk while questioned, and all denied involvement at sentencing.
At the time, Brian Patrick O’Donoghue was working in the newsroom of the News-Miner, giving him a front-row seat to the sad saga that he chronicles in The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement. He and others spotted serious flaws in the prosecution’s case and suspected that a key witness had lied under oath. The words in one reader’s letter received by the News-Miner stuck with O’Donoghue: “Too many people in positions of authority and law laugh at the phrase ‘double standard of justice,’ but Natives know how hard it is to have lived under it.”
In 2001, O’Donoghue quit the newspaper and began teaching journalism classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He made the Hartman murder case the focal point of his investigative reporting class, and, year after year, his students pursued a variety of leads and angles, chasing down interviews and documents and publishing articles in the university newspaper. Eventually, based on their findings, the Alaska Innocence Project reinvestigated the case, and the Fairbanks Four were exonerated and freed in 2015.
Readers may be reminded of the short-lived Hilary Swank TV series, Alaska Daily, about the often-perilous quest for justice and truth at an Anchorage newspaper. O’Donoghue—who competed in the 1991 Iditarod, finishing last—underscores the uniquely Alaskan aspects of this story. A multitude of details emerge over numerous years via a revolving door of students, and sometimes the narrative thread becomes tangled. Nonetheless, their inspiring efforts make The Fairbanks Four an admirable testament to the power of local journalism and citizen justice efforts.
