Early on the morning of November 12, 2016, Anchorage police officer Arn Salao went looking for a man reported for not paying a cab fare downtown. He found a tall man walking west on Fifth Avenue near Cordova Street and pulled up beside him. The man turned and fired, hitting Salao at least four times in the lower body as he got out of his patrol car. Salao returned fire, and Sergeant Marc Patzke of the K-9 unit arrived and fired too. The man fell on top of Salao and kept fighting before he was subdued, and he died at the scene. He was James Dale Ritchie, forty. His gun, a .357 Colt Python revolver, went to the state crime laboratory, which matched it to five unsolved killings in Anchorage that summer.
Ritchie was born in Anchorage on November 4, 1976, grew up in the Wonder Park neighborhood, and was a standout athlete at East Anchorage High School, playing on the 1994 state championship football and basketball teams alongside Trajan Langdon and Mao Tosi. Arn Salao was a freshman at the school in Ritchie's senior year. He went to West Virginia University and dropped out. Between 1998 and 2005 he had a string of drug convictions, and in 2005 he served two years for burglary.
The killings came at night, mostly in parks and along bike paths. Early on July 3, 2016, Brianna Foisy, twenty, and Jason Netter Sr., forty-one, were shot on a trail near Post Road. On July 29 Treyveonkindell Thompson, twenty-one, was found shot on Bolin Street in East Anchorage; a witness description produced a sketch of a tall man in a camouflage jacket. On August 28 Kevin Turner, thirty-four, and Bryant De Husson, twenty-five, were shot in Valley of the Moon Park. For months the police said little publicly about the cases.
Days after the shootout the police said they had enough evidence to close the Thompson case, noting that Ritchie had been following news coverage of the killings and had been wearing a camouflage jacket like the one in the sketch. They were more cautious about the others. On April 26, 2017, the department announced that homicide detectives had established probable cause that Ritchie was responsible for all five, that he had possessed the Colt Python before any of the killings, and that he had acted alone, and it closed the investigations. Because he was dead, he was never charged or tried, and no motive has ever been given. Arn Salao underwent two surgeries and survived.