Lee Kalloch, a 39-year-old male and proud Alaska Native man, died on January 18, 2022, in Fairbanks after a shooting inside an apartment in the Slaterville neighborhood. Responding officers found the 39-year-old male unresponsive in a bathroom with a gunshot wound to the chest; medics attempted life-saving measures but pronounced him dead at the scene. A young woman in the apartment—22-year-old Rachel Yaska—had been shot multiple times in the legs.
Investigators determined that the shooter had fired through the closed bathroom door more than a dozen times before fleeing.
In the immediate aftermath, police identified a person of interest: 22-year-old Takodah Veach. Social-media bulletins from Fairbanks authorities and local outlets asked the public for help as investigators searched for the suspect and the vehicle he was believed to be driving. Within days, law enforcement reported that Veach had been located and taken into custody in connection with the shooting that killed the 39-year-old male and wounded Yaska.
Nearly three years later, on November 19, 2024, the Alaska Department of Law announced that Veach, then 25, pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree for the killing of the 39-year-old male and to first-degree assault for the shooting of Yaska. In describing the crime, prosecutors said Veach arrived at the Slaterville apartment, found Yaska and Kalloch in a bathroom, and shot through the door more than a dozen times, striking Yaska in the legs and Kalloch once in the chest, before fleeing. The plea agreement called for a composite 35-year sentence, with 10 years suspended and 25 years to serve, and a decade of probation to follow.
The following spring, a Fairbanks court imposed the expected 35-year sentence. Coverage of the sentencing noted that Veach had earlier entered his guilty pleas and accepted responsibility for the bathroom-door shooting that ended the life of the 39-year-old male and left Yaska permanently scarred. With the conviction and sentence, the case moved from a frantic manhunt and a citywide plea for tips to a closed chapter in the courts, formalizing accountability for the killing in that Slaterville apartment on a dark January night.
Obituary notices remembered Lee Kalloch not only for the circumstances of his death but for his roots and community ties: born and raised in Fairbanks, with family connections across Interior Alaska, and described by loved ones as “a proud Dena man.” Those remembrances anchor the stark facts of the investigation—shots through a door, a suspect's flight, an arrest and a plea—in the larger story of a 39-year-old male whose life was interwoven with the people and places of Fairbanks.
