Woman shares eyewitness account of Muldoon neighborhood gunman before and after police arrived

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – A woman and her young family say they saw 23-year-old Jalen J. Baker — Gunman charged in Muldoon district on Monday — tried to escape from police near his home in a trailer park in Muldoon.

Janice Susook said she was taking a shower at her home near Muldoon Primary School around 11am on Monday when there was a commotion at her front door.

“I heard my mother and stepfather’s voices, I heard them,” Susook recalled, adding that his family came to visit him by bus.

“The door was slamming and they were panicking. I could hear them saying, ‘He’s trying to shoot us! That guy is trying to shoot us!’

“Even though I had just gotten out of the shower, I came running down the hallway. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘That guy’s trying to shoot us.’ He was also trying to come to my house like that.”

Susook says her husband let his parents in and bolted the door before Baker tried to get in. Susook was home with her infant child, and another child attended Muldoon Elementary School.

“He tried to break into multiple houses,” Suskook recalled, still shaken by Monday’s events. “And then we saw the police, a lot of them, without sirens, just with their lights on, driving around (looking for Baker).”

Amidst all the commotion, Susook managed to get a close-up view of Baker, who then entered the trailer a block away to the north.

“His hands were in his pockets. He was weak,” he said.

He says he saw him running from one trailer to another, looking for a place to hide.

“My babies wanted to go to the window, and I had to keep them out of my living room,” Susook recalls. “So we stayed in this hallway here and hid there, and I kept going in and out and livestreaming on Facebook. I was scared.”

He said that he heard the sound of bombs exploding in his neighborhood and that this was caused by smoke and sound bombs.

“It was so powerful that the bombs were so close to me that it shook my chair and me and my babies fell to the ground. I held on to my babies and we started crying and then I screamed and I realized, oh, I have to calm down,” she said.

She called 911, and the dispatcher relayed that a SWAT team was attempting to arrest Baker, but he was uncooperative.

“I could hear the drones, the police helicopters, all day, all day, into the early evening,” she said. “My kids and I stayed in the hallway and the back room because those bombs were so powerful they shook our trailer and we were scared after that. We couldn’t even eat. It was scary.”

Although it was frightening, he says he found comfort in the police presence.

“It was a relief to know they were here and they had him in a zone and he wasn’t going to go anywhere,” she recalls.

“The police kept telling that man, ‘We’re not going anywhere, but you’re … under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. We’re not going to hurt you.’ I remember hearing that.”

Susook says he is grateful for the police response and the 911 operator’s demeanor in dealing with him on the phone. The situation has been resolved, but Susook and his family remain on edge.

“When the gun was pointed at my mother and stepfather Simon, for some reason it didn’t go off,” Susook said. “Thank God.

“Yesterday was a crazy day, it was hard for me to shake it off. Even today, you know, I hope it doesn’t happen again. It was crazy, like an action movie.”