Do you know who murdered Michael Curry? Michael Curry, a 43-year-old White man, was closing up for the evening at R & R Garage on West Fireweed Lane in Anchorage on April 18, 2012, doing the routine end-of-day work that came with being the shop’s service manager. The last light of an ordinary workday was fading when an unknown armed man came into the front office and turned the familiar rhythms of the garage into a sudden, violent struggle.
Investigators later described the robbery as purposeful and tightly focused on cash.
Curry had been handling the day’s proceeds and securing money in the shop safe, a process that should have been uneventful. Instead, the gunman took what he could from the till and then forced Curry at gunpoint to try to open the safe. The safe did not open. In the tense moment that followed—whether from panic, frustration, or fear of being caught—the gunman shot Curry. As the robber fled, another employee was also shot, surviving after emergency treatment.
In the hours that followed, Anchorage police began combing the scene and piecing together what witnesses could offer. The suspect was described as a young adult man, slim, roughly six feet tall and around 180 pounds. Witnesses reported he spoke with an Eastern European accent. He escaped in a dark-colored, mid-size SUV, slipping into the city before officers could close the net.
The case, as publicly described in official summaries of the incident, centered on an unknown assailant, and no publicly identified suspect was named in those accounts. The investigation treated the shooting as a robbery that escalated into homicide, with no clear indication—based on the available public summaries—that it stemmed from a dispute with customers or workplace retaliation. Despite the initial push to identify the gunman and the vehicle used to flee, the publicly available record does not describe an arrest, charges, a trial, or a conviction tied to Curry’s killing.
