Woman charged in 2016 Clallam County murder, marking first big break for WA's Indigenous cold case unit

Two years after Washington state lawmakers created a unit to solve cold cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous people, the division has filed its first charges.

Tina Alcorn of Arkansas is charged with second-degree murder in the 2016 death of George David, a Neah Bay resident and a member of the Clayoquot Indian Band of Vancouver Island, B.C.. She was arrested in Arkansas on June 3, and remains in custody at Clallam County Jail on $1 million bail.

David, 65, was found dead in a Port Angeles apartment in March 2016, according to the State Attorney General's Office, which heads the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (MMIWP) Cold Case Unit. David had been staying at the apartment temporarily, stopping there on his way from Neah Bay to British Columbia, where he intended to visit family and attend a funeral.

David was a "respected master woodcarver," the Port Angeles Police Department said in a Facebook post. The department initially investigated the case eight years ago.

Alcorn was the primary suspect early in the Port Angeles Police Department's investigation, and she was arrested in Mount Vernon in April 2016 on an outstanding warrant issued by Arkansas authorities.

But Alcorn wasn't charged in David's death at the time: Officials instead extradited her to Arkansas, where she was then incarcerated for violating her probation on an unrelated felony theft conviction.

Port Angeles police reopened the case in 2024, with assistance from the cold case unit and the state's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Task Force, which the department says "provided critical support in advancing the investigation, offering culturally informed resources and victim advocacy in this matter of deep importance to Native and cross-border communities."

"This case has never been forgotten," Port Angeles Police Chief Brian Smith said in the Facebook post. "The renewed investigation, bolstered by our partnership with the MMIWP Task Force, reflects our commitment to justice and to honoring George David's memory."

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The idea to create the unit, formed in 2023, was born from the state's task force on missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The group's recommendation pointed to a 2018 report that found Seattle had the most missing and murdered Indigenous women of any U.S. city — and Washington had the second-highest number of any state.

"As a result of the institutional and structural racism within law enforcement, our people were not seeing investigations and our loved ones were dying in silence," Abigail Echo Hawk, a task force member and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, said at the time.

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Brian George, chief investigator of the MMIWP Cold Case Unit, says part of the problem is that law enforcement agencies are often short-staffed and juggling many cases at once.

"When they are tasked with responding to in-progress crimes or fresh cases that come to their desk, cold cases just get put to the back of the pile," George said. "It's not anything other than capacity and bandwidth to handle these investigations. Investigators, when they have time, do solid work and produce great things, but they just don't have time."

That's where the MMIWP Cold Case Unit comes in. Currently, the unit is working on 25 cases across the state.

The unit's role in each of those cases varies, George said, but in the David murder case, the Port Angeles Police Department had already done a "considerable amount" of work and investigation. Prosecutors just didn't believe they had enough evidence back in 2016 to move forward with charges.

So, the unit largely focused on reviewing evidence. Ultimately, George said, the unit identified other items that could be used as evidence, and performed DNA testing on existing evidence that the department had collected back in 2016.

"In this particular investigation, it was just taking the football the last 10 years to get to the field goal," he said.

Nonetheless, George said it's a milestone to get to this point — especially on the first case the unit was ever assigned.

"It's pretty exciting to get a solve and charges filed in our first case," he said.

At Alcorn's arraignment this week, a judge set her trial date for Aug. 11. The trial is expected to take four weeks.