Do you know who murdered Teuaililo Nua? In the frigid dark of early Wednesday, February 15, 2017, Asian / Pacific Islandera 38-year-old woman named Teuaililo “Teu” Nua was inside the Royal Suite Lodge on Minnesota Drive in Anchorage when sirens began to converge on a building already losing its shape to heat and smoke. Firefighters and police reached the scene around 2:20 a.m., pushing into unstable corridors as parts of the three-story structure threatened to collapse.
When the flames were finally beaten back, the 38-year-old female victim, Teuaililo Nua, was found dead and transferred to the State Medical Examiner, as crews struggled to account for everyone who had lived behind those scorched doors. Sixteen people were known to be injured; the tally of the dead would rise as the day wore on.
By afternoon, investigators called it what they believed it to be: arson and homicide. The 38-year-old female victim's name—Teuaililo G. Nua—appeared in a police bulletin that also recorded the chaos of the rescue and the uncertainty of how many victims remained inside. Within days, authorities identified two other people who died as a result of the blaze, Vivian Hall and Laura Kramer, while relief groups found temporary beds for those left with nothing but smoke in their lungs and the clothes they escaped in. The building, a residential lodge on the west side of town, had partially collapsed; it would stand for years as a symbol of a winter morning that turned lethal in minutes.
Detectives worked through tips and surveillance, soon asking the public to help locate a man they said had information: Andrew John Eknaty. The 38-year-old female victim's death was now the center of a widening inquiry that knit together the Anchorage Police Department's Homicide Unit, the Anchorage Fire Department, the Alaska State Fire Marshal, and federal ATF specialists. In March 2017, police said public calls had helped them contact Eknaty, but the case remained open, heavy with grief and unanswered questions.
Eighteen months later, the waiting gave way to grand-jury indictments. On August 16–17, 2018, prosecutors charged 30-year-old Andrew John Eknaty and 29-year-old Carleigh Kaye Fox in connection with the Royal Suite Lodge fire that killed three—including the 38-year-old female victim, Teuaililo Nua—and injured many others. The counts were sweeping: second-degree murder, manslaughter, first-degree arson, multiple felony assaults, conspiracy, evidence tampering, failure to control a dangerous fire, and even assault on an unborn child. Fox was arrested that morning; Eknaty was taken into custody the following day after a brief manhunt.
Years later, the courtroom finally delivered its reckoning. In May 2024, both defendants—by then identified as Andrew John Eknaty and Carleigh Kaye West —pleaded guilty to three counts of manslaughter and one consolidated count of first-degree assault for the 2017 blaze that took the life of the 38-year-old female victim, Teuaililo Nua, as well as Vivian Hall and Laura Kramer. In October 2024, a judge sentenced each to 60 years and 20 days, with 36 years suspended—effectively just over 24 years to serve—followed by a decade of probation. The state's account of the case emphasized the lasting trauma for survivors and the community's condemnation of the conduct that turned a midtown Anchorage lodging into a mass-casualty scene. Both are now in Department of Corrections custody.
From the first radio call to the last gavel, the investigation into the death of the 38-year-old female victim moved steadily through rubble, rumor, and record—first a plea for help to find a person of interest, then a pair of arrests and indictments, and finally, guilty pleas and long sentences. In the official notes and press releases that chart the case, her name remains a fixed point: Teuaililo Nua, 38, a woman whose life ended before dawn in a fire that investigators say should never have been set.
