Phil Zimmerman sat at a table in a back room of his restaurant in Seward, the Highliner, on the Kenai Peninsula. He thumbed through photos on his smartphone of his late son Josh.
His son Josh Zimmerman died in January 2024 at Anchorage’s prison.
“He’s just a big lug,” Phil said about his son. “Everybody loved him. He would do anything for anybody.”
Phil said his son struggled with addiction, which led to some jail time for minor crimes. When he died, Josh was serving a short sentence for a parole violation. Besides being devastated about his son’s death, Phil is upset about the circumstances.
Josh Zimmerman’s cause of death was homicide, according to his death certificate. And Phil said he didn’t find that out until well after his death, when he requested documents from the state medical examiner’s office. Even after that, Phil said the Alaska Department of Corrections shared almost no information with him.
“Once that report came out and I started asking questions, I was up against a stone wall then,” he said. “I pretty much got a standard response.”
That standard response was that Josh’s death was part of an active open investigation, so the department could not share information—like the autopsy report, toxicology, lab tests, imaging or photos.
Phil filed a lawsuit Dec. 15 against the department for neglecting its duties to protect Josh and for its lack of transparency with family and the general public about Josh’s death. The Department of Corrections declined an interview request for this story.
Phil said his main goal is to push the state to improve safety and protection in prisons.
“Bottom line is, I'd like to see some changes made. It's too late to help my son,” he said as his voice cracked, “But it's not too late to help others.”
Nick Feronti, Phil’s attorney, said the main aim of the lawsuit is to do whatever they can to ensure that no one else is the victim of a homicide in Alaska’s prisons.
“It should not be possible for someone to be murdered or killed when they are in the trust of the Department of Corrections,” Feronti said.
He said that’s the belief driving this lawsuit. They’re suing the department for negligence and wrongful death and asking for money for damages and costs.
Feronti said the state needs to share more information about deaths in prisons with families and all Alaskans. As far as he knows, the Department of Corrections still won’t acknowledge Josh’s death was a homicide. And he pointed out that the chief medical officer of the department testified to the state legislature in March 2025 about deaths in Alaska prisons and didn’t note any homicides from 2015-2025, which included the year Josh was killed.
“Either things are so dysfunctional that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing,” Feronti said. “Or worse, someone does know that something bad is going on, and they're not telling all of us Alaskans about it.”
Bill Lapinskas also believes in transparency for the department of corrections. He retired in 2020, but spent 27 years working for the department as a correctional officer, supervisor and superintendent, and he said he continually pushed for more transparency.
“People need to know what we do in here. It shouldn't be a secret. And I open the doors and I let people come in,” Lapinskas said. “Transparency shows that you try, whether you fail or not.”
But he said that approach didn’t go over so well with the current state administration and he got enough pushback that eventually he retired earlier than he’d planned.
Lapinskas said that there are a lot of people inside Alaska’s jails and prisons trying to keep people safe, but it’s not always simple to prevent violence or killings inside. He said many things can endanger a prisoner’s safety–like their actions while incarcerated or debts from inside or outside.
“When you throw in the gang drama, the drug drama, the culture drama, and all the other things on top of that, it's very complex,” he said. “And it's by the grace of God that they don't have more deaths.”
He said the best way to increase safety overall is to cultivate a dynamic where staff are seen as approachable to those incarcerated.
At Phil Zimmerman’s restaurant, he showed another image of his son on his smartphone.
“My daughter did it with AI,” he said. “It just blows me away.”
It showed Josh Zimmerman holding his niece, with the help of artificial intelligence.
“She's 3 right now, but he had never met her, so to be able to get a picture of him with her is pretty amazing,” he said, chuckling.
Zimmerman won’t ever meet his niece in real life. But his father hopes that if this lawsuit is successful, it may spare the lives of others in the care of the Alaska Department of Corrections.
