Convicted Anchorage Hit and Run Driver back in Court on Perjury Charges

image19-02-2015 13.33.01The 22-year-old Anchorage woman that struck and killed Hubert Tunuchuk on Easter Sunday of 2011 is back in court on unrelated charges of perjury after she alleged to a Grand Jury that Eldridge Bradley robbed her at gunpoint and swore that she did not know Bradley prior to the incident.

But, department store cameras would tell a different story than the one laid out to the Grand Jury by Ashley Bashore, and footage showed the two in the store the night of the alleged robbery. Although it has been shown that Bashore lied to the Grand Jury about knowing Bradley, prosecutors say the state may not be able to prove that she did not get robbed later.

It was on April 24th, 2011 that Bashore ran down Hubert Tunuchuk as he was walking with friends along the Tudor overpass on the Seward Highway with such force that it knocked him out of his shoes, leaving him sprawled in the off-ramp intersection to the Seward Highway. After running up on the curb after hitting Tunuchuk, she sped away.

Moments later, Bashore would text a friend saying, “OMG OMG OMG.” She then drove to that person’s house and told them that she had hit “a mangy Rottweiller without a collar.” She would later delete the incriminating text from her phone.

Tunuchuk had been in Anchorage on break from AVTEC in Seward to celebrate the Easter holiday. Tunuchuk,  from the village of Chefornak, had been taking classes in Seward for power plant operations. He had two more weeks of training to go before he would have graduated.

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Although a taxi driver called the incident in to 911, police would not arrest Bashore for another eight months. When arrested in December of 2011. Bashore pled “Not Guilty” to the charges.

Bashore would plead “Guilty” in a plea agreement to failing to help the victim after the hit and run, Criminally Negligent Homicide and Tampering with Physical Evidence in the Tunuchuk case. In the agreement, her attorney, Rex Butler had asked for three years in jail with two suspended and a probation period of six years in that case, Superior Court Judge Jack Smith felt that the sentence did not appropriately fit the crime and said, “I’m not convinced this is in the interest of justice.” Judge Smith would sentence Bashore to 18 months in prison.

In this current perjury case, Bashore’s bail was set at $5,000. She faces as much as a $100,000 fine and 10 years in prison if convicted.