Public reports on this case do not specify the victim's race or ethnicity. On May 13, 2015, in a small fourplex on the 500 block of East 74th Avenue in South Anchorage, 1-year-old Zarielle Young, a female child, was found dead alongside her parents and her older brother. The discovery came around midday, after the children's grandfather—concerned because the father had not dropped the kids off as usual—entered the locked residence through a window and found the family.
All four had suffered gunshot wounds, and a firearm was recovered at the scene. Police treated the residence as an isolated, domestic incident from the outset, with no indication of an outside intruder. Neighbors later told investigators they had heard gunshots in the deep hours of the night, between approximately 1:37 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., but no one called police at the time.
As investigators processed the apartment and the state medical examiner conducted autopsies, a picture emerged of a contained murder-suicide. According to the Anchorage Police Department and Alaska Public Media's reporting, evidence indicated that 24-year-old Curtis Young III shot and killed his girlfriend, 27-year-old Desiree Leandra Gonzalez, their 4-year-old son Zaiden, and their 17-month-old daughter, Zarielle, before turning the gun on himself. Detectives emphasized that they were not seeking any additional suspects and that the violence had not extended beyond the family's home. The department assigned APD Case No. 15-18995 to the homicide and stated that if facts changed, it would release updates, but the working conclusion remained a murder-suicide within the household.
In the days that followed, authorities publicly identified all four family members and reiterated that the event was domestic-violence-related. Community outlets chronicled the tragedy, and memorial records confirmed the child's age and date of death, anchoring the timeline that began with the grandfather's welfare check and ended with a city grieving a family lost behind a closed door. The official stance—supported by scene evidence and autopsy findings—left no indication of a surviving perpetrator. As a result, there were no arrests in the case; the identified suspect was deceased, and police reported no outstanding suspects to pursue.
