Do you know who murdered Brandon Irlmeie? Alaska Native male, Brandon Christopher Irlmeier, 20, was spending the first Saturday night of December in Anchorage when violence erupted on the 7000 block of Howard Avenue. At 10:41 p.m. on December 2, 2017, police were called to a report of a group altercation; officers arrived to find the 20-year-old Brandon Christopher Irlmeier dead from a gunshot wound. He had been born on May 9, 1997, and had spent most of his life in Alaska after moving north as a small child.
Friends and family knew him not only by his given name but also by his Tlingit name, Yeil Yugóo.
Accounts from his loved ones paint a picture of a young man with a quick wit and a deep affection for his community and family, remembered as kind and quirky, the sort of 20-year-old who could light up a room. In the hours around his death, the confrontation on Howard Avenue turned deadly; relatives later described that he had been beaten, strangled, and then shot, left in the cold rain on a neighborhood stairway near Creekside Park Elementary. The memorial that now sits at the foot of those steps—a wooden cross circled by sunflowers—became a place where his grandmother and others returned to grieve and to keep his story alive.
Investigators announced early that the killing stemmed from that late-night altercation and confirmed that 20-year-old Brandon Christopher Irlmeier died from a gunshot wound at the scene. Despite interviews and public appeals, years passed without a break in the case. Community posts and gun-violence memorials continued to share his name and photograph, while local advocates highlighted his death as part of a larger crisis of unsolved cases affecting Alaska Native families.
No arrests have been made, and police have not publicly identified a suspect or suspects. The case remains an open homicide investigation, with Anchorage Crime Stoppers maintaining a standing request for tips in hopes that someone who saw the altercation—or knows who was responsible—will come forward. For his family, the absence of an arrest has meant that remembrance and the pursuit of justice continue in tandem, season after season, at the same neighborhood corner where a 20-year-old's life ended on a winter night.
