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That Friday in October 1997 held promise for John Hartman. The 15-year-old and his new sweetheart planned to exchange gifts during her morning class break.

Marvin Roberts, 19, entered the weekend renewed by a traditional hunting trip with the father he hadn’t known, a welcome, if temporary, escape from the choices confronting a disappointed scholar.

Arlo Olson, 20, then visiting from Kaltag, his Yukon River village, began partying mid-afternoon with a cousin attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The cousins shared a pot pipe with friends in the bushes behind Lola Tilly Commons.

Hartman, Roberts and Olson — three young Alaskans embracing adult freedoms. All were about to collide through a life-shattering crime — the first, murdered for no apparent cause; the second, jailed and convicted with three others in the slaying; the third, destined for the misery that dogs life as reputed snitch.

Hartman and Roberts shared several things. Both spent good portions of their childhood in single-parent households. Both had mothers who scraped by selling pull-tab cards. Both came from homes occasionally rocked by alcohol-related troubles.

And while both came of age in Fairbanks, they moved in circles — one white, one Native — that seldom overlapped.

‘Birthday’ tokens

Lean and athletic, Hartman played linebacker for the Redskins, a club team in the city’s youth league. He had suited up for the previous Arctic Bowl, where his team earned bragging rights as the league champions. “He would try anything for us,” his coach of three years, Ken Ferringer, would later say.

The amiable teen known as “JG” talked about landing a college football scholarship. For now, he was a “home schooler,” according to family, making up a class he needed to complete middle school.

That fall, Hartman had become a morning fixture at the McDonald’s restaurant on Geist Road.

Credit a girl for the restaurant’s lure.

Elishiva Corning, “Sheva” to friends, was a freshman across the street at West Valley High. Corning had a long break between classes at around 11 a.m. Most weekdays, according to friends and relatives, she and her new boyfriend got together at McDs. That Friday, Corning and Hartman planned on swapping “birthday” gifts. His birthday had come in September. Hers was months away yet. No matter. The planned show of affection wasn’t subject to the calendar.

Waiting for his girl, Hartman shot the breeze with Chris Stone.

Wouldn’t name names

Chris Stone hadn’t seen much class lately even though he was enrolled as a freshman at the school across the road. An assault a couple weeks earlier had landed him in the emergency ward.

At the hospital, Stone initially said he “couldn’t remember what happened,” Trooper Richard Quinn noted in his report.

Follow-up efforts proved futile. Stone refused to cooperate, the trooper wrote, “stating that it would just happen again.”

He closed the case.

In the aftermath, Stone assured friends he was recovering, albeit in a manner no doctor would prescribe: He skipped school and hadn’t been home for at least a week, relying on friends for places to crash.

Before visiting McDonald’s that morning, Stone and another friend, Lathrop sophomore Elijah “EJ” Stephens, smoked crystal meth, a form of methamphetamine.

The drug use came as no surprise to EJ’s mom.

“Yeah. It was just the newest thing, back then,” Melissa Stephens said in a 2003 interview. “They were all trying to make it in their basements.”

Such was the life of Chris Stone, then five months past his 14th birthday.

Family exception

By all accounts, Hartman had more going for him.

Lathrop student Mary Reynaga got to know Hartman through a girlfriend. “He was someone you could trust.”

Hartman and several friends were forming a band. The Sentinels was the working name, according to Trent Mueller, who figured to be the outfit’s drummer.

A true baby of the family, Hartman was the youngest of four boys. His closest siblings were twins, born five years before.

“JG, he was kind of my favorite,” said his oldest brother, Christopher “Sean” Kelly, who shared a love of comics with the kid brother seven years his junior. “I’d be over at someone’s house and trade a lid of pot for a pile of comics,” he recalled in a 2004 interview. “I gave them to JG.”

Hartman shared his older brother’s fondness for getting stoned, friends and family agree. But he reportedly shunned booze and harder drugs.

Hartman’s mom, Evalyn Thomas, worked low-end jobs keeping a roof over her brood. For a time, she’d managed the Yukon Quest store downtown, where JG playfully staffed the souvenir counter.

Thomas’ second marriage had dissolved a few years before in a series of domestic violence orders. She’d recently been arrested on a drunken-driving charge for the second time in five years.

Hartman’s oldest brother, meanwhile, owned a lengthy criminal record. In 1995, the year Kelly turned 21, he faced, among others, felony forgery, theft and burglary charges.

JG seemed to benefit from such examples and generally steered clear of trouble. He had a reputation as a kid more likely to calm situations than get in anybody’s face.

“When he did get pissed off,” Reynaga said,” he’d just go sit quietly and steam about it. Then, he’d just be done. You know? I never saw him fight anybody.”

Explosive relationship

Only two years earlier, Arlo Olson had made the front pages of his Bush school district’s yearbook pictured in coat and tie, one of two students kneeling in the front of the region’s Decathlon Team.

He came from a mixed-ethnic household. His mother is Athabaskan. His father, Glenn Olson, is a white teacher who advanced to superintendent of the Yukon-Koyukuk School District, overseeing 10 village schools including Arlo’s K-12 school in Kaltag, a Yukon River village with fewer than 250 residents.

Drinking and a troubled relationship undercut Olson’s youthful promise. A drunken scuffle at a village dance in January 1996 marked the first of many episodes of domestic violence between Olson, then 18, and his younger sweetheart.

In July 1997, the young woman awakened another Kaltag household. She was intoxicated, half-naked and screamed for help. Olson showed up, punched his girlfriend, according to the criminal complaint, then grabbed “the hair on her head and dragged her across the street back to their house.”

Charges were pending as the young couple visited Fairbanks. Olson’s girlfriend wasn’t drinking. She was pregnant.

Wore ‘Desert Storm’ suit

After Hartman’s girlfriend returned to class that Friday, he and Stone ambled downtown. They visited the borough library, an outdoors store and, finally, the Five Aces pull-tab shop, where JG’s mom worked.

“I was busy. I had like eight or nine customers,” Thomas told the News-Miner later that week. “He asked me if he could have like $5 to go to McDonald’s at Bentley Mall.”

Thomas wasn’t paying close attention, but she noticed, as a mother would, that JG wore his Desert Storm-pattern outfit, a recent birthday gift. “He had just gotten that jacket and pants about two weeks before,” she later testified. “It was the first time I saw him wearing it.”

She recognized Stone, though he wasn’t part of her son’s usual circle.

Thomas gave her son $5, perhaps $10. It was her understanding JG might grab a bite to eat and then head back across town for a babysitting job. He’d be spending the night with John Durham, a friend who lived in that area.

Caught between cultures

Roberts, like many contemporary Athabaskans, grew up calling two very different communities home.

Marvin was 2 and his sister, Sharon, 6, when Hazel and Gerry Roberts split up. She and the kids left Tanana, a village of just over 200 residents, mostly Native, located where its namesake river flows into the Yukon.

They moved to Fairbanks.

When relatives from the village weren’t staying with Hazel in town, she and the kids were often visiting her sister Kathy in Tanana. Marvin’s village connection deepened the year he turned 13. Troubled by his mother’s drinking in Fairbanks, he moved in with his religious, tea-drinking auntie. That fall he attended Tanana’s K-12 school.

By then, Gerry Roberts was busy raising another family, distancing the teenager from his dad though both were again living in the same village.

Hazel Roberts cleaned up her act, and Marvin returned home to finish high school at Howard Luke Academy. It was an alternative school, smaller than Fairbanks’ other high schools, and boasted the district’s largest percentage of Alaska Native students. The setting suited Marvin, who earned recognition as a News-Miner “student achiever” in May 1996.

“Marvin Roberts plans to make a couple of million dollars,” stated the article, which cited the influence of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” his favorite book. “It shows how anybody in the pits can get to the top of the world,’ Roberts told the reporter.

Along with studying business, Roberts said he planned to learn Japanese, “because it would open up so many possibilities for me after college.”

The article described Roberts’ involvement in a Native dance group’s performance at a gubernatorial ball. It noted he was co-captain of the school’s basketball team.

Home video from that year’s graduation ceremony shows Roberts grinning as he was summoned for the salutatorian’s speech. He rose from a folding chair attired in dark gown, cap and dangling tassel. A gold sash circled his neck, attesting to his academic success. Taking the podium, he bantered with Tisha Simmons, a girl in a wheelchair who narrowly out-pointed him for class valedictory honors.

Mirth faded as Roberts solemnly faced the crowd. In a firm, practiced voice, he praised the school’s teachers for instilling the tools necessary for success. He thanked his mom.

Then he touched upon the hazards ahead.

“Every choice we make is important,” he said, surveying his classmates, “because it often determines what our future pathway will be.”

Roberts left the graduation stage to applause. His stride and rolling shoulders conveyed relief and a bit of a swagger.

Wrong turns, missed chances

Not long after graduation, Roberts received an official letter — a mistake had been made. The school had miscalculated grade point averages. Roberts should have been named class valedictorian. It meant more than bragging rights. A foundation associated with Doyon Ltd., the regional Native corporation for the Interior, awarded a $500 scholarship to the valedictorian of the academy named for an esteemed Athabaskan elder. When Roberts and his mother inquired about the prize, they were told it was too late; the award had already been claimed.

“It really bummed Marv out,” recalled Hazel Roberts.

In his graduation speech, Roberts had warned that life after high school might come as a “wake up call.”

He called that right. The boy whose schoolwork garnered praise dating back to elementary school lasted a single semester at UAF. “He wasn’t ready for college,” Hazel said of her son. “He needed a break after all those years working so hard.”

Marvin, likewise, rationalized that he simply needed time off.

A year later, Roberts hadn’t gone back. And he’d given up his job as a youth guide with The Riverboat Discovery tourism operation. He had enjoyed explaining trapping, fish wheels and other aspects of life in Interior villages. But Marvin couldn’t pass up his Uncle Pat’s offer to fight wildfires with the crew out of Ruby, a smaller village perched on a sunny bluff about 120 miles downriver from Tanana.

Drawing on the pay earned chasing sparks and eating smoke, Roberts invested in new clothes, complete with designer shades. He got ahead on payments for the Dodge Shadow parked outside his mother’s home in South Fairbanks.

That fall, Roberts called his father out of the blue and asked to go hunting.

In a 20-foot open riverboat, propelled by a 45-horsepower kicker, father and son followed the big river 270 miles downstream to the village of Koyukuk, then upstream another 120 miles on a tributary.

Gerry Roberts, 49, displayed skills ingrained through a lifetime threading logjams and the Yukon’s braided channels. Marvin caught up on years of lessons missed reading currents, sandbars and shallows. Days passed as the pair stalked through forests. Nights, they warmed by a campfire.

Nearing the trip’s end, the hunters weathered a long night on the river. Their moose-laden boat had become stuck on a sandbar within sight of village lights. Even that annoyance suited Marvin. He got to know his dad.

Hurtling toward each other

Later than afternoon Hartman and Stone caught a ride to Noah’s Rainbow Inn, a cheap motel located directly below the UAF campus. Their destination was Room 244 where Stone’s buddy, Elijah “EJ” Stephens, had the babysitting gig watching his uncle’s toddlers.

Olson and his girlfriend, meanwhile, spent the early part of the evening “emptying the refrigerator” at his grandfather’s apartment in Golden Towers. Afterward, they set out with friends for the wedding reception over at the Eagles Hall.

Friday marked Roberts’ second day back from the hunting trip. His friend Dan Huntington called, suggesting they check out the reception. Everyone would be there. Being the one with wheels, Roberts offered to drive.

Huntington had called from an apartment in Birch Park, the home of a younger kid from Roberts’ old basketball team. Roberts didn’t need directions to Eugene Vent’s place.

After years of sharing the same streets with nary a passing glance, young lives were about to tragically intersect.