She was a 5-year-old female child, living with her mother and little brother in a modest apartment on the outskirts of Anchorage when the day turned strange and then violently final. On October 26, 1996, as dusk gave way to night, an Anchorage police officer, Dan Seely, arrived on a call connected to a warrant for Paul Ely Jr., the estranged husband of the children's mother, Christina. Inside the narrow hallway of the building north of downtown, a confrontation erupted.
A shot felled Officer Seely, mortally wounding him; he would die about an hour later at the hospital. In the chaos that followed, Christina was hit in the stomach, and the small household—already divided by separation and a standing restraining order violation from years earlier—fractured into panic.
With neighbors watching the nightmare gather speed, Paul ran with the two children to a nearby apartment. There, in a moment that froze the room and would echo through Anchorage for years, he pressed the gun to 5-year-old female Jessica Ely's head and fired; the same bullet passed through her and struck her mother in the abdomen. Her 4-year-old brother, Corey, was shot next as he sat on a neighbor's lap. Then Paul turned the gun on himself. By the time sirens finally drowned the ringing in everyone's ears, three were dead where they fell—Jessica, Corey, and Paul—while Christina was rushed to Providence Hospital in serious condition.
The killings tore through the city's conscience. News of a fallen officer and two slain children traveled quickly, followed by the numbed rituals of grief: a funeral announced for 5-year-old female Jessica and her little brother at St. Andrew's Catholic Church, visitation hours posted, a community gathering itself to stand beside a family that had been split apart. The dates and names were written into the public record and into the memory of those who lined up to say goodbye, even as explanations felt as thin as the paper that carried their obituaries.
There were no arrests in the death of 5-year-old female Jessica Ely. The sole suspect was her father, Paul Ely Jr., who died by suicide at the scene immediately after killing his children and shooting their mother. Authorities tracked the sequence from the hallway shooting of Officer Seely to the neighboring apartment where the children were slain, and the case closed on the spot where the gun fell from the suspect's hand. For the public record, the day is fixed—October 26, 1996—and the loss is unanswerable.
