Not Entirely Chillin' at the Motel Mush Inn

It says more about me than Anchorage that I get a slight flood of nostalgia when a crime becomes something peculiarly Alaskan, some particularly desperate and deluded combination of Elmore Leonard and Jack London that is, in a city with a rapid loss of characteristics, inescapably Anchoragian.

I ran into a woman here in Seattle a few months ago who was talking about how much she enjoyed the landscape on her short trip to Alaska, except she was utterly terrified of the motel she'd got on the Internet.

"I locked and bolted the door. We just hid in there all night. But it had these weird theme rooms," she said.

"Was it by any chance the Mush Inn Motel?" I asked. It was. The Mush Inn, that legend of violence, sex stings, and random shootings, is the Casablanca of Concrete St.

The Mush Inn is infamous, going back to the coke-crazy construction days of the Pipeline era. Year ago it cheerfully advertised the Africa Room, the Fantasy Room and other specialty theme rooms in those classic slide still ads on TV. It looked to my eleven year old self like a fun place. And it is, in the strict sense of too much fun.

The latest incident at the Mush Inn Motel finally got a significant public official to file a lawsuit.

Begich and Shell both suggested the motel might need to better screen its customers. The clerk said he already does, and pulled up computer files showing the names of people banned from renting rooms.

"I always put a reason why," he said of the blacklisted names.

One person who wasn't welcome back had taken the key and TV remote, the computer said. Another refused to pay the rent.

Another name on the list was Rodney Averill....

"08:18 AM Shot fired and someone died," read his file. "Do not re-rent ..."

Goodness. But the crime in question had a je ne se quoi, a deep Anchorageness, that sets it slightly apart from any number of American crimes. Blowing a grand on coke in a theme hotel room before losing a fight for your life is part of it, especially when the hotel has malamutes and/or leopard prints all over the walls. Perhaps the fact that such a depressing hotel next to the airport has theme rooms - and has been in business for decades - suggests a fantastic, utterly deluded optimism , or simply the fact that for a very long time, this deadly place to do naughty business was advertised on television.

The shooter got off: self-defense. And so ended Mr. Hubbard. Only Sammie the party girl knows the truth, but she disappeared. The appeal of this moment is that it is probably the end of Anchorage the frontier town, forever.

Averill said he didn't know Hubbard before that night.

According to the charging document, Averill and others were partying in a room at the motel. Over the course of the evening, Averill bought over $1,000 worth of cocaine, according to the charging document. A woman named "Sammie," later identified by police as Samantha Tuttle, 23, was with them.

Tuttle left for a while, then returned with Hubbard and another man. Hubbard accused Averill of taking Tuttle's wallet, the charging document said.

A witness told police that Hubbard kept trying to punch Averill, that they fell onto a bed and he heard a gunshot.

The lesson? If you're going to blow a grand on blow in Anchorage, pick a cement barn with less history.