White / Caucasian male William G. Pfalmer, age 45, died on December 26, 1970 in Anchorage, Alaska, from complications of gunshot wounds he had suffered seventeen years earlier while serving as an Anchorage police officer. On June 9, 1953, then-27-year-old Officer Pfalmer stopped a stolen car occupied by three juveniles. When the driver tried to flee, he disabled the car by shooting its transmission.
As he moved in a second time, one of the youths fired on him, hitting his left arm and right shoulder and shattering his spine. The injuries paralyzed him from the chest down and set him on a long path of surgeries and declining health that ultimately ended during a corrective operation in late 1970.
The portrait that emerges from public memorials is of a young officer who kept serving through pain and immobility for years, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran who had spent three years with the Anchorage Police Department and earlier with the Alaska Territorial Police. He left behind a family—his wife, three sons, his mother, and a sister—who had carried those years with him. His death is recorded as gunfire-related, his end of watch dated December 26, 1970.
Accounts of the shooting consistently identify three juveniles in the stolen vehicle and describe one as the shooter, but available summaries do not name the offender or detail the outcome of any juvenile proceedings. Memorial records explicitly mark the “offender” information as not available, and the department's public remembrance focuses on the sequence of the stop, the flight, the disabling shot to the transmission, and the wounding volley that changed the officer's life. If arrests or adjudications occurred, they are not reflected in the accessible online memorial and department narratives consulted here.
