Male, age 36, Alaskan Native Tyshaun Gray of Anchorage was found dead on April 9, 2018, after officers were called at about 1:00 p.m. to a residence in the 1100-block of Chugach Way in the Spenard neighborhood, a stretch of road running between Spenard Road and Arctic Boulevard. Detectives processed the scene, interviewed witnesses, and quickly reclassified what began as a “suspicious death” into a homicide deemed an isolated incident under APD Case 18-14326.
Through the first days of the investigation, detectives moved from securing the small home to a broader public appeal. They identified 23-year-old Thomas Horton as a person of interest and asked for help locating him, while also seeking a 43-year-old witness, Oinree Devoe, to come forward. The picture that emerged was of a tightly bounded crime—inside a residence, in daylight—yet with key voices still to be heard.
By April 11, detectives reported they had made contact with Devoe and widened their outreach to include a second witness, 24-year-old Cassandra Pitka, as well as an unidentified adult male whom other witnesses had placed at the scene. That evening, Horton turned himself in; he was questioned and jailed on a third-degree weapons misconduct charge as a felon in possession, with investigators noting that additional charges could follow as the homicide case progressed.
The search for information continued into the next night. On April 13, APD announced that Pitka had turned herself in and spoken with detectives, while the effort to identify and locate the unnamed male witness went on. No homicide charges were announced in those contemporaneous public updates; the department's releases emphasized that the case was active and developing.
Authorities did not publicly release how the male, age 36, died in the immediate aftermath, a point underscored in wire-service reports at the time. Separately, national remembrance sites later listed him among those lost to gun violence on April 9, 2018, reflecting how record-keepers tracked the death even as police statements withheld the specific manner of killing.
