In the darkness just after 3 a.m. on September 9, 2025, Anchorage patrol officers were dispatched to the snow‐dump area by Davis Park at 5081 Mountain View Drive. They found two people lying outside—one of them was White Carl John “CJ” Nielsen Jr., age 44—amid a scene that prompted detectives and the Crime Scene Team to cordon off the area for a closer look. From the outset, police treated the discovery as a homicide investigation.
By late morning that Thursday, police publicly identified the victims as Carl Nielsen Jr., age 44, and Sara Ashley Cummings, age 34. Investigators said evidence indicated a double shooting in the wooded tract just south of Mountain View Drive, a place long associated with a large encampment before the city's recent cleanup. The call that brought officers there came in at about 3:18 a.m., and the department emphasized that both deaths were being investigated as homicides.
The man at the center of the case—Carl Nielsen Jr., age 44—was soon memorialized by family and friends who marked his date of death as September 9, 2025 and described him by his nickname, CJ. Funeral notices and memorial pages tied his life to Anchorage, listing relatives and describing the loss felt across a large family. Independent victim registries recorded him as lost to gun violence on that date in Anchorage.
As the investigation unfolded, police had not announced any arrests, nor had they identified a suspect or suspects or a possible motive. Authorities kept the scene processing active while detectives worked leads, but by the time of public updates, no names had been released in connection with the killings other than those of the victims.
