A death on Fireweed Lane

On a quiet Sunday morning in April, Taylor Winchester was working the early shift at the Coffee Queen drive-thru on Fireweed Lane when she saw death on an Anchorage sidewalk.

Her coffee stand sits near Fireweed Lane and C Street, across from a car wash and what she calls “the green box,” a utility box that has become a gathering place for people to drink and hang out.

She was chatting with her first customer of the day when they both noticed it: A man laying across the street on the sidewalk near the green box, face down, his body in an unnatural position.

The customer, who regularly bought coffee and sandwiches to hand out to unsheltered people in the area, rushed across the street.

Soon Winchester heard sirens coming up C Street. An ambulance and fire truck arrived. But the ambulance left soon after. That’s when Winchester knew the man was dead. A white sheet went over the body.

In the 10 years she’s owned the business, it was the second time she’d witnessed a death in her corner of the neighborhood.

A little later that morning, I got a text from a woman I know who lives just down the street.

“I don’t normally do this however. There’s a dead body with a sheet over it being guarded by 2 police cars on Fireweed Lane,” she wrote.

I didn’t know if it was a homicide or an outdoor death, but it seemed potentially like news. I got in my minivan and drove over.

When I arrived on Fireweed Lane, the road was quiet and empty with just the sounds of gulls. It smelled like spring, dust and melting snow. I pulled up just as two police officers were helping someone put a gurney in the back of a vehicle marked “Alaska Medical Examiner.”

In April, eight people believed to be homeless died outdoors in Anchorage. The man on the Fireweed Lane sidewalk, I learned, was one of them.

The deaths unfolded during the same month Anchorage’s main shelter, the Sullivan Arena, was closing. All but 90 of the most vulnerable people were told to leave May 1, but people had been trickling out onto the streets and greenbelts of the city for weeks.

For years, the Daily News has been tracking the deaths of people who live outside. They represent only a fraction of the ways unhoused people die — they miss the homicides, the hit-and-runs, hospitalizations, and more.

But to many advocates, and to me, outdoor deaths are an essential measure of a city’s humanity. After all, shelter is meant, at the most basic level, to keep people from dying on the city’s streets.

[In April, a record 8 people believed to be homeless died outside in Anchorage]

I’ve written about some of the people. Desiree Heglin, the granddaughter of a revered Aluutiq leader whose body was found in a park off Arctic Boulevard. Scott Brown, whose mom spoke about the precious last six months they had together in Sitka before he returned to Anchorage, relapsed and died in bushes near the jail. They stick in my head.

I wanted to find out about the man who died on Fireweed Lane.

The police incident report described what happened in clinical, official terms: At 7:38 AM on April 23, 2023, Anchorage Police responded to a parking lot behind a business on the 400-block of W Fireweed Lane regarding an unconscious person who did not appear to be breathing. The victim was located lying on the ground; medics also responded and declared the adult male deceased. Nothing suspicious was noted at the scene. The Medical Examiner responded and took possession of the body.

It included his name and age. His family has been notified.

I looked him up using public records, and then found his public postings on Facebook. I read about his life in the strangely intimate yet surface way you can learn about a stranger on social media. About his pride in getting a job on the North Slope. About commercial fishing. Counting days and months sober.

He had long hair, full cheeks and a wispy goatee. His face might be familiar, if you saw it. I wondered if I’d seen him before.

Later, I went back to the green box on Fireweed Lane to see if I could find anyone who knew the man. What had his story been? What was he like? Who had he left behind?

No one was there. Then Traci Bovat and Michael Nelson walked up. Both live at the Complex Care, a shelter just down the street run by Catholic Social Services.

The green box has become a hangout spot in Fireweed Lane, with groups gathering to drink and stand around, they both said. Some regulars were living outside. Others were housed, including a few at Complex Care, they said. But rules prohibit drinking in the building, so people go outside to see their friends who are still on the street.

“A lot of people that were staying at Sullivan and just people that are in the community that like to drink or are homeless and don’t have a roof over their head,” Bovat told me. “They seem to flock here.”

They didn’t think they knew the man who died. But people at Complex Care had been talking about it that April morning — wondering who it was under the sheet. If it was a friend or a relative.

I walked behind the coffee stand, to a snow dump area Bovat and Nelson told me was becoming a new hangout. People stood in a small circle. One man wore a full leg brace, due to having been hit by a car while crossing Fireweed Lane, he said. A couple people were passing around a plastic bottle. Did anyone know the man who died?

I knew him, said one man, reclining on the ground. The man on the ground told me his name was King James.

“Sullivan Arena was going to close and he came out here and froze to death,” he said, looking me in the eye. “Report that.”

Eventually, I found the mother of the man who died on Fireweed Lane. Also on Facebook. She had been posting about her grief and disbelief, the way she’d been compelled to bake almost every day since officers showed up at her house to tell her.

The man was 45 when he died. His mom called him “Poopsie.” She taught him to cook and clean, and to have good manners. He could fix anything mechanical. He was supposed to come home to go crabbing soon.

She wanted to talk about him. But she didn’t want his name in the newspaper, she told me. Not on paper. That would be too final.

Michelle Theriault Boots is a reporter who has covered homelessness for the Daily News since 2012.