On the late afternoon of November 12, 2018, Black male, David Anthony Welch, a 27-year-old male, was shot in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express on Spenard Road in Anchorage. Officers were dispatched at 4:27 p.m. and found him gravely wounded from a gunshot to the upper body. He was rushed to Providence Alaska Medical Center, where he died later that day; police publicly announced his death the following morning as the investigation shifted from a shooting to a homicide.
Investigators soon learned that Welch had gone to the hotel expecting a drug transaction arranged through a chain of instant messages between his friends and associates of two men he was about to meet. In the rear parking lot, he climbed into the back seat of the suspects' vehicle. Within minutes, the front-seat passenger turned and shot Welch once in the chest. As the driver began to pull away, the car stopped; the passenger got out, robbed Welch of a quantity of controlled substances, and shot him a second time. Bleeding, Welch staggered into the hotel seeking help before medics took him to the hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.
Detectives moved quickly. By November 18, 2018, they had identified two suspects and found one of them, 35-year-old Dwayne Nelson, at a residence on East 15th Avenue, where he was taken into custody without incident. Leads then pointed to the Backpackers facility on Eagle Street, where the second suspect, 22-year-old Ryan Edwin, barricaded himself in a room. After repeated commands were ignored, SWAT introduced gas and arrested him. Both men were booked on charges of second-degree murder.
Years later, a jury heard the full account. On December 9, 2024, after a five-week trial, jurors found Ryan Shane Edwin guilty of two counts of second-degree murder, first-degree robbery, and third-degree weapons misconduct. The judge declared a mistrial on one count of first-degree murder and one count of tampering with evidence when jurors could not agree. The following spring, on May 13, 2025, Edwin received a composite sentence of 65 years in prison. Public releases describing the trial evidence repeatedly identified Nelson as Edwin's co-defendant in the fatal encounter that killed Welch, though those releases did not detail Nelson's final case disposition.
In the days after his killing, obituaries remembered Welch by his full name—David Anthony “Tony” Welch—and confirmed his death in Anchorage on November 12, 2018. Those notices marked the close of a life that began in 1991 and ended in a hotel parking lot off Spenard Road, a place he entered expecting a deal and left only long enough to reach the lobby for help.
