White/Caucasian, male, 56-year-old Nicholas Wells of Sutton, Alaska, was found dead on the evening of March 27, 2025, after Alaska State Troopers were sent to conduct a welfare check. Troopers arrived around 8:25 p.m. and discovered him inside a Sutton-area residence with multiple gunshot wounds, marking the start of a homicide investigation that would spill into the predawn hours of the next day.
Investigators quickly identified a person of interest: 21-year-old Grant Wells of Sutton.
Through the night, additional troopers and investigators joined the search. Just after midnight on March 28, troopers located a vehicle linked to Grant near Mile 164 of the Glenn Highway, in the broad, snowy country between Sutton and Glennallen. From there, they followed tracks through waist-deep snow to a small cabin tucked off the highway.
What followed was both tense and surreal. As troopers closed in, the cabin went up in flames. According to accounts later shared by authorities and reported in local and national outlets, Grant fled the burning structure into the snow, at which point troopers moved in and took him into custody. The fire, the chase through drifts, and the early-morning arrest brought the manhunt to an end, but it also framed the stark contours of the case—an alleged parricide amid winter conditions, a blaze at a roadside cabin, and a community left reeling at sunrise.
Authorities later confirmed the arrest and detailed the charges that followed. Grant Wells was booked and charged in connection with the killing, including counts of murder and arson arising from the cabin fire. Public records and compiled incident databases identified him as the sole named suspect, with no additional suspects announced by investigators. As with all cases, the charges are accusations and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court, but the investigative narrative—welfare check, discovery of the body, the highway search, the cabin fire, the arrest—remained consistent across official dispatches and subsequent reporting.
In the days that followed, memorial pages noted the loss and recorded the basic facts: the name, the date, the place, and the cause—gun violence on a cold March night in Sutton. Those brief entries, spare as they were, echoed back to the particulars described by troopers and highlighted by local outlets: a 56-year-old father, a remote community, and an arrest that unfolded in the snow before dawn.
