The plane swooped down into Excursion Inlet at sunset Sunday, the sound of its propellers carrying across the cold water and up the spruce-covered mountains before coming to a sputtering halt.
The secluded inlet 35 miles west of Juneau is normally a quiet outpost for hunters, fishermen and the occasional sightseer. Two hours earlier, however, authorities had received a startling call from a handheld radio.
Someone had been shot.
Peering out the cockpit, Alaska state trooper Ryan Anderson could see six men on the beach in front of a cabin. Four of the men had their hands raised above their heads. Another man was securing the area. A sixth man was sitting by himself on a rock.
As Anderson approached, he also made out another figure in the fading light: a seventh man, lying lifeless under a picnic table, with two gunshots to the back of his head.
Anderson quickly pieced together a picture of what had happened. One of the men handed him a .41-caliber magnum revolver allegedly used in the killing. And two witnesses said they had heard Mark De Simone – the man now sitting by himself on the rock – admit to shooting Duilio “Tony” Rosales, according to charging documents. De Simone, 53, was arrested and charged with murdering Rosales.
But the killing remains deeply mysterious because of the enigmatic man at its center.
Eight years ago, Mark De Simone was a handsome Arizona lawmaker who posed for his statehouse photo in crisp suit and tie. His dark hair was slicked back and he flashed a beaming smile.
On Tuesday, he appeared in a Juneau court looking haggard with gray hair, a over-sized orange jail jumpsuit and a bewildered look on his face.
How had he ended up here?
“I just want to ask him why he did that to my husband,” shouted Maria Rosales, according to the Associated Press. “Just give me an answer. Why?”
Downward spiral
Mark De Simone’s slide from Arizona lawmaker to Alaska murder suspect will likely be the subject of court hearings to come. But if there is a simple answer to his fall from grace, then it lies at the bottom of the bottle.
De Simone, who also spelled his name DeSimone, was born in upstate New York but lived in Juneau from 1981 to 1988, attending high school in the remote Alaskan capital.
It was in Arizona, however, that De Simone rose to prominence.
He attended Arizona State University in Tempe before opening a cafe and bar in Phoenix in 1990, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In 2006, De Simone was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives after becoming active in politics while opposing a ballot measure banning smoking in bars and restaurants, Mary Jo Pitzl, a reporter at The Arizona Republic, told the Juneau Empire.
“He was known as a pro-business Democrat, which was part of his appeal to his district,” Pitzl said, adding that De Simone represented a middle to upper middle-class district. “He was easy to talk to, very approachable, just sort of like a bartender.”
But if De Simone often came across as a friendly bartender, he could also act like a brazen drunk. On June 26, 2008, he allegedly attacked his wife in an alcoholic rage. De Simone threw his wife, Mali, to the ground and then began pummeling her, according to a police report obtained by the Arizona Republic.
“Mali told me Mark sat on top of her around the stomach area and started punching her with his closed right hand in the face and arms,” a Phoenix Police officer wrote in the report. “Mali said she was tired of fighting with Mark and just gave up and let Mark continue hitting her.”
When De Simone locked himself in a bedroom with their children, Mali called 911 and Mark was arrested. He was charged with misdemeanor assault but the charge was dropped after he resigned and agreed to undergo counseling, the New York Times reported.
De Simone and his wife divorced. He disappeared from politics and devoted himself to his bar.
“I ran into him a year or so later. He was out running around at the capitol and I asked him if he was thinking of ever running again and he said, ‘Oh, maybe sometime, but this is not the time,’ and that’s the last I saw of him,” Pitzl told the Empire. “He came across as just sort of a nice guy. Nothing extraordinary. The most ink he ever got was because of the domestic violence problem.”
Jim Small, editor of Arizona Capitol Times, told the Empire that De Simone’s problems seemed to stem from alcohol abuse.
“I remember talking to him one time and he mentioned he went through a substance abuse program, that he wasn’t drinking anymore,” Small said, recalling a conversation with De Simone after the lawmaker resigned. “He had a problem with alcohol and he said he’d gotten over that. It was a problem I was unaware of in covering him. It’s not like he had a reputation at the capitol for being a boozer.”
De Simone appears to have fallen off the wagon, however. And he changed after his bar closed last year. A series of posts on his Facebook page show him unemployed and increasingly distraught over the direction his life had taken.
“In case you haven’t noticed I am looking for work,” he wrote on Feb. 4. “I am very willing to do odd jobs too if you know of anything. Thanks.”
On April 5, a series of Facebook updates prompted concern from his friends.
After several friends asked if De Simone was alright, he replied with a typo-filled apology.
In reality, however, Mark De Simone was not doing fine. Not at all.
Escape to Alaska
It’s unclear when and why De Simone arrived in Alaska. Maybe it was to escape Arizona, where things had gone so wrong. Maybe it was to reconnect with high school friends, or to rediscover himself in the rugged wilderness.
According to prosecutors, he had been “couch surfing” and working as a day laborer for the past month.
He had also been drinking.
It was during one of those drinking episodes that he allegedly shot Duilio Rosales.
Rosales had moved to Juneau five years earlier and worked at a downtown jewelry store. His boss and some friends had invited him out to Excursion Inlet for a hunting trip.
“They kept bugging him to come down and he wasn’t going to,” friend Morgan Cruz told the Empire. “Then Friday he decided to go down ‘cause they also said they needed supplies.”
When Rosales spoke to his wife, Maria, on Sunday, he said he was having fun.
Prosecutors say Rosales was seated at the picnic table, taking off his boots, when De Simone shot him twice in the back of the head.
Seth Bradshaw, a member of the hunting party, told troopers that he was relieving himself behind the cabin when he heard two gunshots.
When he walked towards the source of the sound, he saw De Simone.
“I shot Tony. I shot him. It’s my fault,” De Simone told Bradshaw, according to the charging documents.
When Bradshaw’s brother, Samuel, spotted De Simone walking along a trail after the shooting, he also heard De Simone mumbling to himself about shooting Rosales, according to the charging documents.
A member of the hunting party radioed for help. Two hours later, trooper Anderson arrived in an airplane and found De Simone, the former lawmaker, sitting by himself on the rock.
Many questions remain about the shooting, chief among them the motive.
Prosecutors have said the shooting could not have been an accident.
“There were two shots from a .41 magnum revolver, which is a difficult firearm to shoot,” Juneau Assistant District Attorney Amy Paige said in court Tuesday, according to the Empire. “It requires … upwards of 8 pounds of pressure to shoot it. So it’s the kind of weapon that if you want to fire it once you have to mean it, to fire it twice means you definitely do.”
The gun appears to have belonged to Rosales, who was found with an empty holster on his hip, according to the charging documents.
De Simone has not yet entered a plea. His bail was set at $500,000.
During Tuesday’s arraignment, Maria Rosales demanded answers from De Simone.
“Answer my daughter, she’s 5,” she shouted at the man accused of killing her husband. “She’s just asking for him since he left! I have no answer for her … What (am I) going to say now that he’s not coming back?”
De Simone did not reply.
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