Gathered on the sidewalk outside Safeway, friends and co-workers remembered Brandon C. Cook as someone with a big smile and an even bigger heart, known for always helping others.<\/p>\n
A transplant to Alaska himself from Oklahoma, Cook went out of his way to be friendly, especially to new employees at the grocery store.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember when I started at Starbucks, he was the first person to really make me feel welcome,\u201d Rochell Harmon, a barista at the Mendenhall Valley store, said into a microphone while sniffing back tears.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it was my second day, he walked up and said, \u2018Hey, are you new to Safeway?\u2019 or \u2018Hey, are you new to Juneau?\u2019\u201d another employee named Andrew said.<\/p>\n
Cook, 30, was fatally shot inside a Juneau trailer park last week as he helped a friend paint the kitchen in her newly acquired trailer in Kodzoff Acres Mobile Home Park. The Juneau Police Department described the shooting as unprovoked and unforeseen. The man accused of shooting him, Christopher Dean Strawn, 32, was arrested for first-degree murder the following day and is being held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center on $1 million bail.<\/p>\n
Safeway Store Director Dawn Wheeler organized the ceremony and balloon release Monday to honor Cook. About 50 people showed up, some of whom took turns speaking and sharing stories with the crowd. Cook\u2019s mother listened to the ceremony by phone from Cook\u2019s hometown of Wewoka, Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one is supposed to die the way he did, when he did,\u201d Wheeler said. \u201cIt\u2019s not supposed to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since he didn\u2019t have any blood relatives in Juneau, Cook\u2019s co-workers \u2014 both past and present \u2014 became like a family to him. At the time of his death, Cook worked in the Safeway\u2019s produce section and also at the Alaska Airlines ramp at the Juneau International Airport. He\u2019s held a number of retail jobs in the community since he moved to the capital city almost a decade ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a great guy,\u201d said Eddie Rabino, 29, who said he met Cook almost 10 years ago when they worked at Foodland IGA together.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe worked right side-by-side together,\u201d Josh Reed, Safeway\u2019s produce manager and Cook\u2019s boss for the past four months, said. \u201cHe was serious about his job, and he wanted to do a good job. Opinions meant everything to him, and if you had something to say about the department, he wanted to listen.\u201d<\/p>\n
The focus of Safeway\u2019s ceremony was solely on the shooting victim Cook, but there was underlying tension \u2014 the suspected shooter, Strawn, also worked at Safeway as a nighttime janitor. Many of those in attendance worked with Strawn at one time, and emotions ran high when asked about him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope he rots in jail, I really do,\u201d Heather Abrams, a 19 year old who works at the Safeway deli, said of Strawn.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll he was was interested in himself and his drugs,\u201d Aileen Sanchez, 31, a close friend of Cook\u2019s who works in Safeway\u2019s liquor department said. She described Cook and Strawn as different as night and day.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was really spiraling out of control,\u201d she continued. \u201cHe\u2019s the blackest of black souls, and Brandon was just the purest, brightest \u2014 they were just opposites.\u201d<\/p>\n
Technically, Strawn was never employed by Safeway, according to company spokeswoman Sara Osborne out of Washington. He likely worked for a contractor who worked for Safeway, she said Friday. \u201c\u2026 He was never employed by the store or the company.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not yet entirely clear whether Cook and Strawn crossed paths at Safeway. A police complaint states they knew each other through the landlord of Cook\u2019s friend. The landlord recommended that Tiffany Marie Albertson hire Strawn to help with her new trailer\u2019s renovations.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Cook was helping Albertson in the trailer the night of Oct. 20 when Strawn left the trailer, returned with a shotgun and shot Cook in the head from behind. Assistant District Attorney Amy Paige said in the courtroom that there was no way else to describe it but as an \u201cexecution style\u201d murder.<\/p>\n
The witness to the shooting, Albertson, spoke at Monday\u2019s ceremony at Safeway, but didn\u2019t speak to what she saw or heard that night. She thanked the crowd for showing up and said she wanted to keep supporting Cook\u2019s family. After the shooting, Albertson created a GoFundMe account, which has raised $2,850 to help Cook\u2019s family with funeral costs. The funeral is scheduled to take place Wednesday at a funeral home in Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019ll forever be in my heart,\u201d Albertson said, describing Cook as an older brother to her.<\/p>\n
Albertson isn\u2019t the only one who created a fundraising account to raise money in connection to the case. Strawn\u2019s sister, Felicia Baker, created a FundRazr account, called \u201cGood Man Wrongly Accused,\u201d seeking money to pay for an private attorney for Strawn, rather than a public defender the Juneau court appointed to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe wholeheartedly in our brothers innocence and hope you will join us in the effort to vindicate him from all charges,\u201d Baker\u2019s description of the account reads online. \u201cWe would just like him to have a real opportunity to prove his innocence using a strong legal defense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strawn\u2019s girlfriend, Julia Lanz, 43, shared the link to the fundraiser to a couple popular Juneau Facebook pages, which caused an uproar online among commentors.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet the —- out,\u201d one person wrote. \u201cNobody in their right mind is going to help you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWrongly accused?!\u201d someone else chimed in. \u201cHow is that possible it was only him and another woman in that house when this guy was shot in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a phone interview Friday, Lanz said she strongly believes her boyfriend is innocent. She confirmed he was a drug user \u2014 prosecutors signaled as much in the courtroom last week, but said the evidence is still pending \u2014 but Lanz said he had been trying to \u201cclean up his act\u201d recently because he has a son and is expecting a child with Lanz in June.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would like to let everyone know that he\u2019s not a monster,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Lanz used to work at the Juneau Safeway as well. She said she quit in September 2014, and Strawn quit a month or two after her.<\/p>\n
At the store on Monday afternoon, a few of people in the crowd released a handful of purple balloons into the air in Cook\u2019s memory. They floated above the store as people craned their necks to watch.<\/p>\n
\u201cLove you!\u201d one person called out loud.<\/p>\n
Wheeler said she thought a balloon release seemed like a fitting tribute to Cook, saying it represents \u201ca good spirit going up.\u201d Safeways across Alaska followed suit, and stores from Anchorage to Nome released balloons in Cook\u2019s honor. Alaska Airlines released balloons in Cook\u2019s honor on Monday, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I can hope is that something good comes out of this, that there\u2019s some sort of closure for everyone, like there\u2019s some sort of peace and happiness we can find,\u201d Wheeler said. \u201cSo we thought with a balloon memorial release, it would be a way of basically a good spirit going up, and it just keeps rising the way it should.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gathered on the sidewalk outside Safeway, friends and co-workers remembered Brandon C. Cook as someone with a big smile and an even bigger heart, known for always helping others. A transplant to Alaska himself from Oklahoma, Cook went out of his way to be friendly, especially to new employees at the grocery store. \u201cI remember […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":30765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30764"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}