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2 Alaska Officers Killed; Incident Triggers Standoff

Hoonah Police Dept. officers Tony Wallace, left, and officer Matt Tokuoka. Bob Prunella, acting city administrator for the village of Hoonah, says the officers died after a shooting late Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010. (AP)

Wallace was originally from Ohio and one of the few hard-of-hearing officers in the nation, according to officials at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, where he attended the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He also was a wrestler and was inducted into the RIT Athletic Hall of Fame in 2008.

He first joined the Hoonah police force in 2006, leaving for personal reasons after seven months, according to a September 2009 interview in the RIT University News. He rejoined the department in 2008, where he served as the small department’s evidence officer, and was recently designated as a breath-test maintenance technician.

“I have had tremendous support from my fellow police officers and have gained their confidence by proving every day that a person with my hearing deficiency poses no problems on the job,” Wallace said in the RIT interview. “I have always believed that I could do the job of a police officer and here I am.”

According to the law enforcement networking website http://www.usacops.com, Tokuoka was a former Marine Corps staff sergeant who served in special operations. The Hawaii native had been with the department since spring 2009.

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