GOLDENDALE — On Feb. 5, after months of questions from the public, the Klickitat County Sheriff’s Office announced they were closing the investigation into Hannah Walker’s death as an accidental drowning. Though Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer stated in a press release that the investigation has been thoroughly reviewed by the office and multiple partners, Walker’s family are still left with questions and concerns as to the validity of the investigation.
Walker, a 31-year-old Portland woman, died Oct. 12 in Trout Lake under suspicious circumstances, as previously reported in Columbia Gorge News. Following a domestic violence incident with her ex-boyfriend, she was staying at a friend’s cabin in Trout Lake.
According to police records, Walker and her friend, a 66-year-old man, allegedly went swimming at the creek that afternoon, at approximately 2:30 p.m. At approximately 3:30 p.m., the friend said that she swam downstream. At approximately 6:50 p.m. the friend called 911 to report her missing. Following a search of the creek, Walker was found unclothed and facedown in the water. She was pronounced dead at 11:32 p.m.
The investigation that followed Walker’s death raised many concerns with her family. Walker’s mother, Aia Walker, alleges mismanagement of the case from the onset. Aia Walker was not informed of her daughter’s death until she called Klickitat County for a wellness check, three days after Hannah Walker’s passing. Additionally, the family has had difficulty retrieving her belongings.
Aia Walker also had concerns about the lack of investigation around the friend Hannah Walker was with. She alleges that they never checked him for defensive wounds or took his DNA. This is supported by the police records, as, apart from a conversation which is not detailed, no investigation into the friend appears within the records.
According to Songer, the sheriff’s office has reviewed the case and, based on available information and evidence, they believe Hannah Walker died of accidental drowning.
“If anybody comes up with credible information, the case can be reopened, but we’re not going to go on any goose chases,” Songer said. “We’ve put over a year into that investigation, and it’s coming up accidental drowning. There is no evidence of any criminal foul play or anything.”
However, according to Aia Walker’s former attorney, Corrine Sebren, the failure to investigate properly upfront can be a difficult mistake to make up for after the fact. Their review now may be missing crucial information that wasn’t gathered at the scene at the time of Hannah Walker’s death.
“They didn’t investigate,” Sebren said. “So it becomes really difficult after the fact to try to investigate. There’s their crime scene collection, which was so poor. They didn’t really do any real interviews and DNA sampling. So now it’s just become this mess. That county sheriff’s office never wanted anything to do with it. They were just happy to call it an accidental drowning and take the off-ramp and not deal.”
However, Andrea Zafares, medicolegal death investigator, aquatic death investigations consultant and expert witness, and author of multiple books and articles on diving and aquatic death and homicide, has a different perspective on the case. Namely, Zafares believes that most police departments aren’t equipped to deal with aquatic deaths.
According to Zafares, staged aquatic homicides — that is, cases of suffocation or forced drowning staged to look like accidental drownings — aren’t something most police departments are equipped to handle. The majority of patrol officers, detectives and crime scene investigators have no training in aquatic deaths, let alone staged aquatic homicides, she said.
“If there’s a fire death, there’s going to be a fire investigator and fire investigators have hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of training, plus their experience,” Zafares said. “And it’s evidence-based when you have a vehicle crash, of which the vast majority are accidents, right? Most of those crash reconstructionists have well over 500 hours of training plus the thousands of hours they have with experience, plus all these tools and research and evidence-based training. But when it comes to water, there is no training they’re getting, and there is no special investigator that comes out.”
Zafares said that aquatic homicides are one of the most misdiagnosed causes and manner of death. Oftentimes, in aquatic homicides, the autopsy is only a piece of the puzzle and it takes outside elements to put the whole case together.
“The autopsy in these types of cases is one small piece of the answer,” Zafares said. “And the problem is that law enforcement don’t understand that, so they wait to see what the autopsy says. Now, a good forensic pathologist is going to say ‘Okay, well, the autopsy can’t tell me, but certainly intent can tell me if somebody jumped in, fell in or was pushed in. There’s no way an autopsy can’t tell you that. So a good forensic pathologist wants detectives in the autopsy room and is going to ask them lots of questions, and until they have all the answers, they’re not going to rule it. But that’s not what happens.”
Besides the reliance on the autopsy, there are other concerns about Songer’s approach to the case.
In Songer’s statement on the closure of the case, he mentions the Washington Attorney General’s Office as having reviewed the case. However, according to Aia Walker, she spoke to the Attorney General, who agreed the case had been mishandled and was going to give Songer recommendations on the case.
“The Attorney General, when I spoke to him, told me that it is still Sheriff Songer’s jurisdiction, that they can’t tell him what to do or force his hand, that they left with pages of notes and recommendations suggesting actions to take,” Aia Walker said. “But they delivered a letter to me within like two days that closed the case. So we can only assume that he didn’t follow the recommendations.”
Neither Aia Walker or her attorney have been able to obtain a copy of the recommendations as of yet, though Aia Walker made a public records request in February. Currently, she is expected to receive a response by early April.
Though she keeps running into obstacles in finding the truth as to what happened to her daughter, Aia Walker feels a responsibility to keep trying. She said that she has chosen to serve as the spokesperson for her family, but they are all impacted by not knowing what happened to Hannah Walker and that she may not have gotten a proper investigation.
“Don’t think my children aren’t affected,” Aia Walker said. “Don’t think that her extended family is not affected or doesn’t want this resolution. We’re trying to protect other members of our family from his harm, because Sheriff Songer knows full well that he’s not going to get into any trouble. That’s why he feels comfortable treating people this way, and that needs to change.”
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