White/Caucasian female Shatara Stone, age 15, was shot in Anchorage on the afternoon of December 7, 2021, as she rode in a car with her mother through the Fairview neighborhood near East 14th Avenue and Denali Street. A single round struck the sophomore from Bartlett High School in the head. Medics rushed her to Providence hospital, where she was kept on life support; she died two days later on December 9, 2021, according to police updates and contemporaneous reports.
A family fundraiser created the day after the shooting described how the teen was fighting for her life in the ICU while relatives held vigil, and community posts and memorial pages marked the loss that week.
Anchorage police quickly focused on a suspect: Odell Branch III, 42. He was arrested and initially charged with attempted murder and assault based on charging documents filed after the shooting; after the teen's death, police reclassified the case as a homicide and said additional charges would follow. Summaries of those filings describe a bullet intended for the driver—Shatara's mother—who had been the target of an earlier conflict, while the teen, age 15, was the one who suffered the fatal wound. Public incident logs list the scene at East 14th Avenue and Denali, and national gun-violence trackers record that the suspect, age 42, was arrested and unharmed during the apprehension.
In the days that followed, friends and family gathered for a candlelight vigil near the corner where the shooting happened, offering remembrances of the 15-year-old whose life ended in the same week it was violently interrupted. Local roundups and memorial pages echoed the same timeline: shot on December 7, 2021; pronounced dead the morning of December 9; a suspect in custody; a homicide case moving forward.
