Shooting critically injures woman in Anchorage apartment complex

A 20-year-old woman was critically injured early Saturday morning by a gunshot fired from another apartment in an Anchorage complex, according to police and a witness account.

Officers found the injured woman at the Mockingbird Drive apartment complex, near the Seward Highway and Dowling Road, around 2 a.m. Saturday, police said in a prepared statement. She's now in a local hospital in critical condition, the statement said.

Detectives charged 22-year-old Joseph Lock of Anchorage with first-degree assault after an investigation.

By midmorning, police officers were still stationed outside apartments on the complex's second and third floors — one directly above the other. Officers at the scene declined to answer questions, and department officials didn't immediately respond to requests for additional details.

But one of the upstairs residents, who declined to give his name, said the victim was in his apartment when she was struck by the bullet.

"It just passed up through the floor," he said in a brief phone interview. "She was at the wrong place at the wrong time."

A next-door neighbor to the downstairs apartment said she was sitting on her bed early Saturday morning when she heard a gunshot. She peeked out from her apartment, she said, and saw one of the two men who lived next door.

"He came flying out of his apartment, going, 'What was that? What was that?' " said the neighbor, who asked not to be identified. She said she nonetheless thought the man had fired the shot, since he'd talked about having a gun.

She said she saw the police ultimately put the man in handcuffs. She didn't see anyone injured emerge from the second-floor apartment, she added.

The two men had lived next door for three months, the neighbor said, adding that she'd never learned the name of the man who'd been handcuffed.