White/Caucasian male Shawn Erik Reid, age 34, died in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 21, 2007. His death was publicly noted in local obituaries that confirmed his age, the date and city of death, and that he was an Anchorage resident. Those remembrances also record biographical details: born January 28, 1973, in Honolulu; raised in Washington state; a 1992 graduate of South Kitsap High School who later worked in Anchorage, including at Home Depot and the Cattle Company.
A memorial service was held at Rabbit Creek Community Church in Anchorage.
In the early morning darkness of that Wednesday, a passerby reported a dark-blue Chevy Tahoe sitting oddly in the roadway with a partially rolled-down window near Fairbanks Street. When officers arrived, they found blood inside the SUV and, nearby, Shawn Reid—gravely wounded—who was pronounced dead at the scene. Accounts of the discovery describe the SUV's interior spattered and suggest the assault began in or around the vehicle before Reid collapsed in the ditch along the street.
Anchorage police soon determined they were confronting a murder-suicide. Investigative summaries and contemporaneous reporting identify the gunman as 25-year-old Lew Saeteurn, who shot Shawn Reid and then turned the gun on himself around 2:30 a.m. Reid was described as a friend of Saeteurn's estranged wife. With the shooter deceased, no arrests were made; the case was cleared by exception as a murder-suicide rather than through a custodial arrest.
Public memorial pages and victim registries have since marked Shawn Reid's death as a loss to gun violence on March 21, 2007, fixing his name and age to that date in Anchorage. These notices, together with local obituaries and archived community remembrances, form the record of a night that began with a single suspicious vehicle and ended with a confirmation of two deaths—one a 34-year-old man whose life's particulars were remembered by family and friends, and the other the 25-year-old suspect whose suicide foreclosed the possibility of an arrest or trial.
