On July 27, 2023, in Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, Alaskan Native Dustin “Dusty” Iworrigan—age 33, male—was shot and ultimately died from his wounds. A 9:50 p.m. call to Alaska State Troopers first described an attempted suicide, drawing investigators to the village as fog and distance stretched the hours. In a close-knit place where families are intertwined, the name that would soon surface belonged to someone inside the same household.
As troopers worked back through the night, they determined that the shooter was Iworrigan's 16-year-old nephew, Walker Ross. The teen, according to investigators, shot his 33-year-old male uncle, then turned the gun on himself and fired into his own abdomen before seeking medical care—without immediately disclosing that his uncle lay gravely wounded at home. Hours later, responders found Iworrigan unconscious; both he and the 16-year-old were transported off the island to Anchorage for treatment, but the 33-year-old male victim did not survive.
Within days, authorities announced that the 16-year-old suspect from Gambell would be charged as an adult with attempted murder related to the shooting of his 33-year-old male uncle. The Alaska State Troopers' Western Major Crimes Unit led the investigation, piecing together a timeline that began with a misreported suicide and ended with a death in the family. Public records memorializing the victim's death and national incident databases confirm the fatality, while early charging documents and summaries describe the arrest and adult charges against the juvenile suspect.
In the aftermath, Gambell—remote, sea-ringed, and reliant on medevacs when tragedy strikes—absorbed the shock of a killing that arrived from within. The case, marked by the immediate arrest and charging of a teenage family member and the confirmed death of a 33-year-old male, moved from rumor to record in a matter of days, leaving behind a story of loss, investigation, and a community reckoning with violence in one of Alaska's most isolated towns.
