TaKory Lyn Stern, a 31-year-old Black/African American man from Fairbanks, Alaska, was born on April 19, 1983, and grew up in the Interior community he called home. Loved ones remembered him as a local kid who attended Fairbanks schools, earned his GED, played Little League, joined Boy Scouts, and marched with the Young Marines in the Golden Days Parade—a life rooted in family and familiar streets. On July 31, 2014, that life ended.
His family's obituary announced his passing at 31, a terse notice that marked the suddenness of the loss and the grief that followed.
The day he died, Fairbanks police were engaged in a pursuit when the chase reached its grim conclusion: authorities reported that the man they were following shot himself, and the incident was recorded in gun-violence tallies as a fatal, self-inflicted shooting during a police chase in Fairbanks on July 31, 2014. Contemporary incident logs and memorial listings place his death in that category, reflecting law-enforcement accounts that described an apparent suicide at the end of the pursuit.
Because investigators determined that the fatal wound was self-inflicted, there were no arrests tied to the death of the 31-year-old man, and authorities did not identify suspects; the case was treated as a suicide rather than a homicide. Public incident summaries and memorial records for that date corroborate the absence of any suspect search or charging decisions related to his death.
