She was Brandy Marie Sullivan, a 37-year-old white woman from Anchorage. On Thursday, February 16, 2017, the 37-year-old was killed inside her Anchorage home. In the months before the shooting, she and her husband, Adam Sullivan, had separated. That afternoon and evening, according to investigators and later court findings, Adam followed the 37-year-old to her residence, attacked her as soon as she went inside, inflicting blunt-force injuries, and then shot her once in the head and three times
in the back before fleeing. Officers with the Anchorage Police Department found him later that night with the handgun still in his possession.
What began as an urgent police search quickly hardened into a homicide case. The same night the 37-year-old was killed, detectives detained Adam Sullivan; in the hours after the shooting he had phoned both his girlfriend and his brother and admitted what he had done. Early reports and obituaries named the victim as Brandy Marie Sullivan, age 37, and set the scene in Anchorage on February 16, 2017, while court filings and press releases later filled in the sequence: stalking, assault, the four shots, and an attempted escape plan interrupted by his arrest.
Years later, the case reached judgment. After a five-week bench trial, an Anchorage Superior Court judge found Adam Sullivan guilty of second-degree murder for the 2017 killing of the 37-year-old. The verdict was announced on March 4, 2022. That summer, on August 16, 2022, the court sentenced him to 75 years in prison. Officials described the murder as a planned execution carried out by a very dangerous person, a characterization anchored in the stalking, the assault that preceded the gunfire, and the admissions he made afterward.
The record of the 37-year-old's life—her name, her age, the date and place of her death—endures in public obituaries and memorial notices. The record of accountability—who was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced—rests in official statements from the Anchorage Police Department and the Alaska Department of Law, tracing a straight line from the violence of February 16, 2017, to the courtroom decisions that followed.
