From life in Akutan to death in Anchorage, the late Arthur Stepetin/GoFundMe
The cost of convenience
The Anchorage Police Department has finally identified the hit-and-run driver behind the wheel of a Jeep Cherokee that killed 63-year-old Arthur Stepetin Jr. on Aug. 29.
“Further investigation determined 33-year-old Bessie Binkowski was driving at the time of the incident. An arrest warrant was issued on September 11, 2025. Bessie Binkowski was served her warrant on September 13, 2025, and remanded at Hiland Mountain Correctional Complex on the charges of Leaving the Scene of an Accident, Leaving an Accident Without Assisting the Injured, and Violating Conditions of Release.”
The Bristol Bay Native Corporation’s “Student of the Year” in 2011, Binkowski left the Southwest region of the state to attend Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka and eventually gravitated to Anchorage where her fate collided with that of Stepetin, a onetime, rural Alaskan who grew up in the Aleutian Island community of Akutan just west of the Bay before he too migrated to the state’s urban core.
Court records indicate both found themselves struggling with life in the city. Stepetin was several times caught driving while intoxicated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but appeared to have pulled his life together since then. It has been almost two decades since his name showed up in connection with criminal proceedings in the Alaska court system.
State court records, meanwhile, indicate Binkowski was charged with driving under the influence in February and was out on bail when she ran into Stepetin on Northern Lights Boulevard. Those records also show that Binkowski was convicted of driving under the influence in May 2021.
Police have not said whether she had been drinking prior to running into Stepetin shortly after 8 p.m. nor have they revealed has fast she was driving. But it is common for drivers to speed through the business district that surrounds the intersection of Northern Lights and the Boniface Parkway at 35 mph, and speeds of 45 mph or more are as common in the country’s northernmost city as are the long days of summer and the short days of winter.
“….Pedestrians struck at 20 mph had only a 1 percent chance of dying from their injuries,” according to the Institute, “but at 35 mph, the risk reached 19 percent; at 50 mph, it exceeded 80 percent.”
Safe places
European countries have recognized this and lowered speeds in many urban areas. Helsinki, Finland – a northern city like Anchorage with a population about twice as big – just went a year without a road fatality.
Anchorage, a city in which nearly all main roads feature cars moving along at deadly, often-near-highway speeds, last year set a record for pedestrian deaths. Slowing speeds has been suggested, but drivers are widely opposed to the idea.
City officials have said they want to lower speeds, but contend the state is in control of speeds on many of the city’s major roads. The state has largely been in hiding on the issue. And politicians representing Anchorage in the state government have been amazingly quiet.
There is no doubt that lowering speeds saves lives. Wales, a country within the United Kingdom, lowered the default speed limit in urban areas from 30 mph to 20 mph in the fall of 2023, and the BBC this week reported that since then “almost 900 fewer people have been injured on Welsh roads” and “casualties fell by 46 percent.”
“We created a policy based on evidence,” Lee Walters, the government minister credited with leading the drive for lower speed in the “bulit up areas” of Wales told the BBC, “this isn’t something that we plucked out of the air, and the stats two years in are consistent with what the evidence told us to expect.
“I certainly got lots of insults and abuse, and there are certain parts of the population where it’s very hard to have a rational discussion about cars. But as these figures show, most people have just got on with it.”
Drivers in Wales are still speeding, according to the Transport Department for Wales, but they are speeding at safer speeds. The agency reported the mean speed for the past winter on urban roads was 24.9 mph, which was “3.8 mph slower than before the 20mph speed limit change.”
Police also added enforcement on the streets, and drivers caught speeding faced a minimum fine of £100 ($136) plus three penalty points. There is almost no enforcement of speeding on Anchorage city streets, and drivers who run over and kill pedestrians in crosswalks – which are theoretically supposed to protect pedestrians – are fined $100 and punished with four points on their license in a state where it takes 12 points in 12 months or 18 points in 24 month to force a “mandatory suspension or revocation of the driving privilege,” according to the Division of Motor Vehicles.
Tragedy all around
Anchorage’s much more liberal approach to unsafe driving sometimes leads to tragedy all around.
Binkowski now faces misdemeanor charges of violating her conditions of release and leaving the scene of an accident for colliding with Stepetin, but failing to assist the man injured in that collision and then fleeing the scene is an Alaska felony punishable by up 10 years in jail, a $10,000 fine or both.
For Binkowski, a mother of two children who is very active on social media, life has already changed dramatically. On Sept. 13, according to APD, she transitioned from a life where her social media showed her smiling and greatly enjoying the outdoor adventures of the 49th state to being locked up at the Hiland Mountain Correctional Complex.
For Stepetin, of course, the results were even worse.
His family is still trying to raise the funds to send his remains home to Akutan in far Western Alaska. A GoFundMe page for Stepetin says Akutan was “a place that held deep meaning” to him.
Stepetin’s late brother, Jacob, grew up to become a revered community leader in Akutan. He was elected that community’s first mayor at the age of 19, and, according to a 2023 obituary in The Aleutian Current, a publication of the Aleut Corporation, “worked dutifully and diligently to incorporate Akutan as a city in order to harness benefits, such as the raw fish tax amidst the early heydays of crab fishing in Alaska. Akutan became a superpower in the fishing industry due to the inspired leadership and dedication which Jacob displayed for many years. Jacob was an original board member for the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association (APIA), the Alaska Native non-profit organization serving the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Region for health and social services, and he served on numerous boards throughout the Aleutian region during his lifetime.”
Art II grew up in Jacob’s shadow, and like so many from rural Alaska, eventually moved to the state’s urban core, where there are more job opportunities than in any rural areas. It can only be considered tragic that his life ended in a collision with a sport-utility vehicle driven by another from rural Alaska.
According to APD, Art was crossing East Northern Lights near Rose Street when he was struck by the Jeep Cherokee “driving westbound in the left lane” of the roadway.
At the location in question, there is a raised, paved median between the four-lanes of Northern Lights that encourages pedestrians to cross the road from a bus stop on the north side to businesses on the south side of the same street, thinking they have a safe waiting zone between the traffic zooming past on both sides.
An Anchorage People Mover bus leaves the stop on the north side of Northern Lights near Rose Street/Craig Medred photo
It is not unusual to see people hurrying to catch the bus rush across the street at this point. It is particularly dangerous in that drivers in the right lane going west often move quickly into the left lane if they are behind a bus approaching the bus stop.
Someone rushing to catch the bus could easily be clipped by one of those drivers. Whether this is what Art was doing is unknown.
It is also not unusual to see drivers speeding in this area or looking at their phones for whatever the reason Anchorage drivers feel compelled to spend so much time with their noses in their phones.
This form of distracted driving is now a norm in Alaska’s largest city.
Whether that played any part in Art’s death is another of the unknowns, but APD notably did not charge Binkowski under the state’s distracted driving law. Then again, the Fairbanks Police Department somehow overlooked the behavior of a truck driver who admitted to being bent over for “four seconds” peering into his mirrors before he heard “a big thump.”
The big thumb was his truck running into cyclist Matt Glover, who died. Glover was riding along the shoulder of the Alaska Highway on his regular commute from his home in North Pole to his job in Fairbanks.
Truck driver Fred Aker blamed Glover for the collision even though Glover had the right-of-way.
“…When I bent over to look in my mirror, he chose that moment to pull over into my lane of travel without looking,” Aker claimed. How Aker could see Glover pulling over when Aker wasn’t looking at the road is unclear. Not to mention that all indications were that Glover was following a straight line along the shoulder of the road when crossing the access road Aker was using to merge onto the highway.
Fairbanks Police, however, decided against charging Aker with distracted driving or failure to yield when merging onto the highway. This so-called “windsheild bias” or “car brain” on the part of law enforcement in Alaska is something of a universal norm for U.S. law enforcement.
Binkowski would likely have avoided prosecution if she had stopped at the scene of the collision with Stepetin. Nearly all drivers who do so in Anchorage escape prosecution or face only minor charges unless they are discovered to be intoxicated at the time of the collision.
APD reguarly protects drivers who kill pedestrians. It is still refusing to disclose who ran down 85-year-old Clara Mattice on DeArmoun Road at midday on June 19 or whether the driver who sped around the corner from Elmore Drive onto DeArmoun and hit her was cited or charged in connection with her death.
For better or worse, this is normal law enforcement behavior in this country, even when high-profile figures are killed. The 22-year-old driver who veered into a bike lane where he ran down from behind and killed cycling New York Jets assistant football coach Greg Knapp in July 2021 was never charged or identified.
“The driver’s identity will not be released as a matter of privacy as he is not being criminally charged,” local authorities told the newspaper.
The story is usually the same in Anchorage, although the names of drivers who kill in Alaska are legally a part of the public record. The problem is that if a state or local agency refuses to release a public record, someone has to go to court to protest that decision in order to unseal the record, and lawsuits are costly.
Back in the days when newspapers were highly profitable businesses, the Anchorage Daily News regularly led the charge to file lawsuits against local and state government entities that withheld public records, but that hasn’t happened for a long time now. The last time was in 2018 when the municipality refused to release a report that had led to the suspension of the then chief of police.
Categories: News
Is alcohol the defining factor as more natives move to Anchorage?
Why was this included? “For better or worse, this is normal law enforcement behavior in this country, even when high-profile figures are killed. The 22-year-old driver who veered into a bike lane where he ran down from behind and killed cycling New York Jets assistant football coach Greg Knapp in July 2021 was never charged or identified.”
I’m worried about Anchorage and the constant game of dodging jaywalkers.
I will also note that in the case of Stepetin’s death, you neglect to mention whether he was in a crosswalk or whether he was crossing with the light.
If you read the story, it’s obvious he wasn’t in a crosswalk. But there’s no law against that.
As for Knapp, he’s mentioned because, along with the others, his death is reflective of how these deaths are treated.
I am, personally, glad you are worried about dodging jaywalkers. It means you stay alert when driving and don’t run into them or other motor vehicles or pedestrians in crosswalks, which happens with alarming regularity in this city.
Didn’t the Assembly pass an ordinance that relaxed jaywalking laws downtown? Once you get used to the notion that you can jaywalk downtown, its not long before you do it everywhere. Sad story, though. Cheers –
The Assembly did relax the road crossing requirements for pedestrians, and downtown – with its many light-controlled intersections – was one of the few places that this might have increased midblock road crossings. But downtown isn’t where people were, or are, being run down and killed.
The problem is concentrated more in midtown and the rule on road crossings the muni loosened didn’t make much of difference there because it said that “no pedestrian shall cross a street or thoroughfare at or within 150 feet of access to a pedestrian tunnel, overhead walkway, marked crosswalk, or signalized intersection except in a marked crosswalk.”
Now, I don’t know how many so-called “jaywalkers” were rundown within 150 feet of a crosswallk in Midtown, but I’d expected not many given that people tend to cross Northern Lights, Minnesota, Benson, etc. at midblock somewhere because they are so far from a crosswalk or light that it is way, way, way out of their way to go there.
And, of course, we’ve had a goodly number of people hit in crosswalks (I’ve talked to at least three this year who survived) plus those APD reported dead, and I know of at least one APD reported as “out of a crosswalk” who according to a witness was in a crosswalk, but was knocked out of it by the vehicle that hit and killed her.
The simple realities here are that 1.) Anchorage has a lot of bad drivers, sober or drunk; and 2.) Anchorage road speeds are too high in some areas full of people. Most of the cities I’ve been in slow speeds to 30 or at least 35 mph in business districts. A stretch of Northern Lights through Midtown is posted at 35 mph, but almost no one drives that slow because there is no enforcement.
Forty or 45 is more the norm, and I’ve pulled in behind people doing more than 45 just out of couresty to see how fast they were going only to be passed by somebody going far faster than that. I’d venture to guess that if APD hung a radar on the walkway over Northern Lights just east of the Seward Highway (and just outside Midtown), it would record plenty of people driving highway speeds rather than the posted 40 mph there.
Notice that no charges for assault or homicide have been filed yet. It is an obscene artifact of Alaska Criminal Law that you are more likely to be charged with leaving the scene of a homicide than the homicide itself, even though there is no doubt whatsoever as to what happened.