Brenda L. Smalley, a 47-year-old white female was gravely wounded in the early hours of February 3, 2019, inside a home on the 5900 block of East Sixth Avenue in Anchorage. Police were called around 2 a.m. to reports of shots fired and found her and her husband in a bathroom, both with gunshot wounds to the upper body. Two other adult family members were inside the residence. Brenda L.
Smalley died of her injuries later that day, a loss recorded by local and national outlets that noted the shooting occurred in the context of domestic violence.
Detectives described the incident as isolated and domestic in nature and, early on, said they were not seeking additional suspects. Within days, investigators publicly identified the man in the bathroom as 61-year-old Danny Smalley and concluded he shot Brenda L. Smalley before turning the gun on himself. Authorities summarized the scene—shots fired just after 2 a.m., victims discovered in the bathroom, wounds to the upper body—as they reclassified the case from a shooting investigation to a homicide-suicide.
No arrests were made. The investigation closed with the determination that the person responsible for killing Brenda L. Smalley, age 47 and female, also died at the scene, leaving no outstanding suspects. Subsequent roundups of the year's killings reiterated the classification and the location on East Sixth Avenue, while memorial listings preserved the date and city of her death.
