In the pre-dawn cold of September 29, 2018, Samoan, Fa'avae Seau, a 24-year-old male from the Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage, stepped onto the third-floor balcony outside the apartment where he lived next door. It was around 4:50 a.m. on the 100-block of Price Street when a visitor climbed the stairs to see a friend at the building. The man and the 24-year-old male had never met. A single shot rang out on that balcony, striking the 24-year-old male in the chest.
First responders rushed him from the hallway outside the apartment to a local hospital, where he died later that day.
Detectives working the scene learned that the balcony shooting was not an isolated act. About ninety minutes earlier, the same suspect had approached an unarmed man, Donald Wells, in a Dimond Boulevard parking lot by a taco truck and shot him multiple times before fleeing. As officers and investigators compared the evidence, they tied the two events together: the earlier nonfatal shooting on the south side and the fatal shooting of the 24-year-old male in Mountain View. With witnesses interviewed and surveillance canvassed, the case quickly zeroed in on a single name.
Later that week, investigators activated a support unit to find the suspect. They located him late in the morning at a residence on Medfra Street. He tried to escape, ramming police vehicles in a failed bid to get away, and was arrested and taken to the Anchorage jail. At booking he was 25 years old and faced charges that reflected the violence of that morning: Murder in the First Degree, Murder in the Second Degree, Attempted Murder in the First Degree, and Assault in the First Degree.
Years passed before a jury heard the full story in a three-week trial. Jurors learned how the night had begun with a chance encounter at a Muldoon gas station, moved to a parking lot shooting on Dimond, and ended on a Mountain View balcony where the 24-year-old male stood outside his home. They were told the defendant claimed self-defense in the first shooting and denied responsibility for the second, insisting someone else had killed the 24-year-old male. The jurors rejected those defenses. On April 30, 2025, they convicted Dashawn Anthony Street of Murder in the First Degree for killing the 24-year-old male and of Attempted Murder for the earlier shooting. Sentencing was set for the fall, closing the legal loop on a morning that began with a single gunshot and left a neighborhood grieving.
