On the Sunday night of December 3, 2017, in southeast Anchorage, a 26-year-old white male, Joshua Statham, crossed paths with another person near the intersection of East 68th Avenue and Lake Otis Parkway. What began as an altercation spilled out from a nearby Holiday gas station at that corner around 10:45 p.m. Gunfire followed. Officers arrived to find the 26-year-old male gravely wounded; he was rushed to a hospital, where he died in the early hours of Monday, December 4, 2017.
Police said the killing appeared to be an isolated incident.
In the days that followed, detectives publicly asked for help identifying two men seen at the Holiday station moments before the confrontation, and they circulated images of an older-model white Cadillac sedan tied to one of those men. Investigators believed the pair were “persons of interest” who might hold the key to what unfolded at the intersection and why. The search for answers focused on the brief window between the store and the street, when a tense disagreement became deadly and the 26-year-old male's final minutes were set in motion.
Years passed before a break came. In December 2021, Anchorage police arrested a 35-year-old man, Joseph Thomas Jones Sr., and prosecutors charged him with second-degree murder in the shooting death of the 26-year-old male. Charging documents described a chain of events that began with people looking for a missing phone and culminated in the fatal encounter near the gas station that night. The case that once depended on blurry images and appeals to the public now had a named suspect, and an allegation that tied the 2017 confrontation to a frantic search that spiraled into violence.
Outside the courtroom filings and police bulletins, notices of loss marked the passage of time: obituary pages recorded that a 26-year-old male, Joshua Brandon Statham, died in Anchorage on December 4, 2017, the date that closed the timeline begun the night before. Those brief memorials echo the stark details of the investigation—the age, the city, the winter date—against which the criminal case slowly took shape.
