Update: Confirmed — Pirate has been photographed in Redding, California, panhandling at an intersection.
In early December, a man named Pirate reappeared in Fairbanks and caused alarm: He’d been accused of brutal rape and sexual assault in cases in other states, as well as Alaska, and now he was a vagrant, without a place to live and with no visible means of support. What could possibly go wrong? People warned each other to lock their doors.
Pirate, who had legally changed his name in 2013 from Daniel Lloyd Selovich, was hard to miss, with a face covered in Polynesian-style tattoos and a mouth that is missing teeth. The community of Fairbanks became concerned, even fearful, and a Facebook group was started to track his every movement. After all, in the dead of winter, it was as though a boogyman had descended upon the northern community — a man with a face designed to scare and a rap sheet to match.
Now, he has evidently left the state; he was last seen boarding a plane for Seattle on Dec. 24, 2019.
He had been escorted Fairbanks Memorial Hospital by security guards earlier that day after an extended stay, witnesses said.
Pirate had been charged in the kidnapping and extended raping of a woman in a cabin near Manley Hot Springs over a period of five weeks in the fall of 2015. Those charges were dropped in 2016 after the woman died of unrelated causes.
Pirate was extradited from Alaska to Nevada in 2016, where authorities had connected him via DNA to a Las Vegas rape 12 years earlier. In 2018 he pleaded guilty to sexually motivated coercion and was sentenced to serve up to five years, but was given credit for 645 days served.
He had also been convicted of rape in California in 2004. A string of arrests from Florida to Missouri included everything from vagrancy, panhandling, forgery, burglary, and vandalism.
In early December, he was hanging around inside a McDonald’s restaurant in Fairbanks, and telling people he was living in the woods near the University of Fairbanks. And then, poof, he disappeared, and rumors surfaced that he had been admitted to the hospital.
With Pirate back in the state, the Fairbanks District Attorney’s office reviewed whether it could reopen the dismissed case against him for rape and kidnapping.
Ultimately, the State decided it could not pursue those charges from 2015 for the same reasons they were dismissed in the first place after the death of the victim. There was simply no way to cross examine the victim, which would have led to an unfair trial.
“The Department of Law has completed its review of the evidence and concluded the dismissal of the 2015 case, while extremely frustrating, was appropriate under the law,” the department wrote in a press release on Dec. 12.
In Fairbanks, some say they think Pirate headed back to Las Vegas, while others say they heard he was heading to Oregon. The Facebook page that was tracking him was put into warm storage, with administrators stating they would be ready to restart the page if Pirate ever appears in Fairbanks again.
