In the early morning darkness of April 20, 2018, 25-year-old Alaskan Native, male Todd James Demoski was shot inside the Alaska Motor Inn at 419 Fourth Avenue in downtown Fairbanks. Officers were dispatched around 3 a.m. for a report of a weapons incident and found the 25-year-old male wounded in a common area of the motel. He was taken to the hospital, where he died of his injuries, and the quiet of the hour gave way to the churn of a homicide investigation as detectives secured hallways and
canvassed the aging property.
By the following day, the search for a suspect had led investigators from the Alaska Motor Inn's corridors to a residence off the Parks Highway. With a coordinated operation involving the Fairbanks Police Department's SWAT team and the Alaska State Troopers SERT team, officers moved in on the afternoon of April 21. At 3:57 p.m., they arrested 21-year-old Leron Kwase Roland of Las Vegas on a charge of first-degree murder and booked him into the Fairbanks Correctional Center. The swift arrest closed the first chapter of the case less than forty hours after the shooting that killed 25-year-old male Todd James Demoski.
The city would come to remember the crime alongside the long-troubled building where it unfolded. The Alaska Motor Inn—already notorious for disorder and decline—remained a landmark of grief tied to the death of 25-year-old male Todd James Demoski until its eventual demolition years later, a civic effort to sweep away a blighted corner of Fourth Avenue even as the memory of that night lingered.
