Maureen Brown was the first of three sisters in the Brown family to lose a child to a violent death. Before he was stabbed in his chest and left for dead in a ditch, Clifford White was just an 18-year-old boy who loved playing basketball, and who brought happiness to his mother when he played.
“I never went to a basketball game to watch my son sit on the bench. I always went to see him play starting five,” Brown, 65, said from inside her Juneau apartment where pictures of her son adorn the walls.
Her son died on New Year’s Day in 1990 in Hoonah where Brown’s family lived before moving to Juneau. There was never a conviction for his murder and the news of his death made barely a splash in the papers; it appears to have only been mentioned once on page three of a Jan. 4, 1990 copy of the Daily Sitka Sentinel in a 78-word brief.
“… A motorist found Clifford White, of Hoonah, on Monday night with a stab wound to the chest, troopers said. White was pronounced dead at the Hoonah clinic about half an hour later,” is the short tale of White’s death in the media.
It threw his mother into an emotional pit where she found solace, and an addiction, through alcohol. When she dug herself out, ready to care for her remaining two boys, she came away with a lesson in loss. It’s a lesson that, 26 years later, she would pass on like a family tradition to her two younger sisters.
The loss
Gathered around their sister Maureen’s dinning room table, Myrna Brown, 64, and Laura Sheldon, 63, go over some of the final details for the community event they’ve been planning for about a month. It’s a community wellness gathering for families across Juneau. It takes place from 2-5:30 p.m. on Sunday at Twin Lakes park and, if it goes the way Myrna has been praying for it to, it will be a day of family fun, filled with songs, dance and laughter. But the idea for the gathering was born from none of those things. Myrna and Laura have each lost two children within the past six years, and each lost one child because of a violent assault.
“I was having a hard time at the hospital because I didn’t know where Jordon was, I didn’t know where it happened. I said ‘Is Jordon Sharclane here?’ One of the nurses said ‘All I know is that there was two stabbings and one of them didn’t make it.’” Myrna recalled of the night she found out her son and grandson were involved in a stabbing this past December. “It broke my heart to hear her be so callous about it.”
[Victim’s family: Fatal stabbing was over stolen iPhone, iPod]
She would later find out that it was her son who “didn’t make it,” and her grandson, Michael Sharclane, suffered multiple stab wounds, but survived. She describes herself as one might imagine — a mother in despair, confused by the events of that night that are still being pieced together in courtrooms. The alleged killer, Kevin Scott Nauska, 20, is scheduled to face a manslaughter charge in a jury trial in two weeks. He’s currently out on bail and Myrna says running into him around town is difficult, but not more difficult than remembering she won’t hug her son Jordon again.
Myrna grieved the loss of now her second son (her son Anthony Sharclane died in 2011 because of brain issues), and Maureen was by her side, relating to her sister in this new and terrible way. Then, one month later, their sister Laura too would join in their misery.
“Didn’t even seem like we had time to grieve, and then we started getting calls about Linda,” Myrna said.
Linda Sheldon Skeek, 32, was Laura’s daughter. She is presumed dead after the Anchorage Police Department arrested Skeek’s husband, Thomas Skeek Jr., 33, for murder and tampering with evidence — days after he called police reporting his wife as missing.
[Murder charges in case of missing Juneau woman]
Laura flew to Anchorage where her daughter Linda had just moved in the last year to see for herself if it was true. A body wasn’t found and the only evidence she knows of are the blood-stained walls in the couple’s home. After seeing what she assumes was the scene of her daughter’s murder, she hasn’t stopped replaying possible scenarios in her head about how her daughter struggled to survive.
While suffering this loss, Laura was still reeling from the loss of her son, Wilfred Sheldon, who died the year before from lung disease. Laura frequently breaks down in tears when thinking about it all, especially what remains unknown from her daughter’s past and her own future. Laura struggled as an alcoholic for 20 years. Her deceased daughter was the one who pulled her out of it, literally, dragging her off a park ground and taking her to Rainforest Recovery for treatment four years ago. That was her daughter, always trying to help people out of their troubles because she was grateful for the times people helped her, Laura said.
“Loosing two kids in this last year, that’s probably the biggest challenge I ever had staying sober. I always want to cry and drink,” Laura said.
Laura, who used to knock on her sisters’ doors late at night begging for cash for her next drink, now comes to their doors for comfort.
“I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t where we’re going to get closure for my sister,” Myrna said about Laura.
“It took a long time to heal and these two are just starting,” Maureen said of her two suffering sisters. “It’s like an open wound that won’t heal, and it just hurts. Grief is just something you can’t explain.”
The healing
But they’re not alone. That’s what Myrna said she has to remind herself of daily.
“There’s a lot of attention on me, because I’m the mom, but I look at my grandkids, his (Jordon’s) kids. … They’re the ones that lost a dad,” Myrna said.
Myrna is now raising four of her deceased son’s children. She said they often visit Twin Lakes because it’s a place their father would take them often because he didn’t have a lot of money and it was something he could do for free with his children. She said he loved to spend as much time as he could with those kids. Now, when the children visit the park, they’re struck with sadness.
“‘We were playing and then we started missing dad,’” Myrna recalled two of her grandchildren telling her.
Myrna said that’s not the way she wants her grandchildren to continue living, with the ghost of their father as a sad figure that keeps them from moving forward. Instead, she would rather the entire Juneau community suffering from some senseless assault or violence in their family move forward together.
That’s why instead of just a day in the park with the kids, Myrna, Maureen and Laura organized the free community wellness event. The sisters reached out to various businesses and organizations to donate goods and asked for monetary donations. They said they managed to get a free bounce house donated for the kids, gifts for door prize games, dance groups to join them and Doug Chilton will bring tribal canoes to the event. The sisters said they want a place for the community to be happy during what feels like a streak of so much sadness in Juneau. The sisters call themselves the Brown Bear Den in honor of their last name and the bear moiety from both their parents’ Eagle clans. They said they’re inviting the community to heal in their den.
“The community needs something,” Maureen said. “It seems like when you help heal a community, you heal yourself.”
To learn more about the community wellness event, call Myrna Brown at 500-8448.
• Contact reporter Paula Ann Solis at 523-2272 or paula.solis@juneauempire.com.
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On a wall inside Maureen Brown’s apartment, a frame with photos of her deceased son, Clifford White (far right), and her deceased nephew and niece, Jordon Sharclane and Linda Skeek Sheldon (from right to left) hangs in their honor. All three are presumed to have been killed violently while living in Alaska, but in Skeek’s case a body was never found, and convictions have not come to pass for the deaths of Sharclane and White.
