On September 22, 2016, in the predawn darkness of Barrow—now known as Utqiagvik—police were dispatched at 5:13 a.m. to a home on the 5000 block of Laura Maddison Street after a call reporting a shooting. Inside, officers found Billy Jens Leavitt, a 43-year-old, Native American/American Indian male and the North Slope Borough's search-and-rescue coordinator, shot and dead at the scene. Officials stressed early that it was not a suicide, and prosecutors traveled to Barrow to review the investigation as the community absorbed the news.
As detectives worked through the first hours, they said the people involved had been identified and no one was at large. Within a week, a charging document filed in Barrow District Court named a suspect: Robert “Bobby” Clark, Leavitt's 20-year-old stepson. According to the filing, Clark called police from a neighbor's house around 5:15 a.m., walked out with his hands up, and said he had shot his stepfather after a violent, alcohol-fueled fight. Prosecutors charged Clark with second-degree murder.
Details in the charging document sketched a chaotic night in a crowded home. Clark's mother, Doreen Leavitt—the borough's health director—and Clark's girlfriend, Amber Downey, told investigators that both Clark and the 43-year-old male victim had been drinking before the confrontation moved from room to room. The filing describes Clark's blood-alcohol content as. 194 after his arrest and says officers recovered a Smith & Wesson. 500-caliber revolver near the body. In interviews, Clark alternated between claiming fear and calling the shooting accidental.
In the days immediately following the killing, the North Slope Borough conveyed condolences while emphasizing that the public faced no ongoing threat as prosecutors weighed potential charges. Those early assurances framed the shift from a dawn emergency call to a courtroom narrative naming a single suspect and a single gun in a house where a family's night unraveled before sunrise.
Billy Jens Leavitt, a 43-year-old male, is also recorded as lost to gun violence that day; public tributes and memorial listings preserve only the barest facts of his age, the date, and the town at the top of the world where he died. A separate case profile notes his identity and heritage within a prominent local family, tying his name to a broader North Slope story that extends beyond the police tape.
