In the deep hours of July 29, 2016, Black/African American male, Bobby Dwayne Thompson, 21, was killed in Anchorage, Alaska. A lifelong Anchorage resident born in 1995, he died that Friday when his life was taken on a city street. His death would later be counted among a string of seemingly senseless summer killings that unsettled the city.
Just after 3:00 a.m., neighbors near Duben Avenue and Bolin Street reported a burst of gunfire. Responding officers found a 21-year-old male lying in the roadway, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators later shared that he had been bicycling home from work; his yellow Motiv mountain bike was missing when police arrived, a small, telling absence that suggested how suddenly the attack came.
In the days that followed, detectives asked the public for help, and the case carried the heavy stillness of an investigation with few immediate answers. With assistance from the FBI, authorities offered a $10,000 reward for information, an uncommon step aimed at shaking loose the single clue that might explain who fired those shots before dawn and why. There were no arrests, and no suspect was publicly identified in the immediate aftermath.
The break arrived months later, not from an arrest but from a violent encounter downtown on November 12, 2016, when Anchorage police exchanged gunfire with 40-year-old James Dale Ritchie, who died at the scene. Testing on a Colt Python revolver recovered after that shootout linked the weapon to a series of Anchorage homicides from the summer, including the killing of 21-year-old Treyveon-Kindell Thompson. On April 26, 2017, police announced they had sufficient probable cause to conclude Ritchie was responsible for five murders committed that summer. With the suspected gunman dead, the cases, including the killing of 21-year-old Treyveon-Kindell Thompson, were closed without an arrest.
Behind the headlines was a young man whose obituary described him simply and starkly: a 21-year-old Anchorage son whose life was “taken” on that Friday in July, mourned by family and community. The service notices and tributes that followed hint at the abruptly broken arc of a life that had been rooted in the city where he was born and raised.
