‘He took my baby for nothing’: 15-year-old Anchorage girl fatally shot while driving with her mom

A 15-year-old girl has died after being shot in the head near downtown Anchorage earlier this week as she and her mother drove to pick her sister up from elementary school.

Shatara Stone, a sophomore at Bartlett High School, was declared dead at 8:37 a.m. Thursday after spending two days hospitalized on life support, her mother Tara Jones said.

“My daughter was innocent,” she said. “She didn’t deserve this. It was not her time to go.”

Odell Branch III, 42, was charged Wednesday with attempted murder and assault in the shooting, which happened at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in the heart of the Fairview neighborhood. At the time Branch was initially charged, Stone was on life support.

[15-year-old Anchorage girl who was fatally shot in Fairview is remembered at candlelight vigil]

Stone’s death means a murder charge is likely forthcoming, though one had not been filed as of Thursday afternoon.

The bullet Branch fired was intended for Tara Jones, who was driving the car, according to a charging document filed by Anchorage prosecutors. It hit her daughter instead.

“He was trying to kill me,” Jones said. “I wish he would have killed me. That bullet wasn’t for my baby.”

The shooting unfolded on Tuesday afternoon, as Jones and her daughter were rushing to Inlet View Elementary to pick up Shatara’s younger sister.

On the way there, Jones said she turned down 13th Avenue in Fairview and drove past a man she recognized: Odell Branch, the uncle of a man Jones had a past troubled dating relationship with.

Jones says Branch had threatened her with a gun once before, in October. That time, she’d had all three of her kids in the car, and Shatara, her oldest, had recorded the encounter on cellphone video, Jones said.

“(Jones) said Branch III began yelling obscenities at her,” the charges say. “He grabbed a gun from the trunk and fired into her moving vehicle from behind.”

Mother and daughter hadn’t quite made it to the stop sign a block away when Jones heard a pop.

“I said, Shatara, he just shot at us, I’m going to call 911,” Jones said. “I looked over and she was slumped down.”

Jones tried to pull her daughter out of the car and perform CPR in the snow.

“He took my baby for nothing,” she said. “For nothing.”

Police found Branch and another man, Bektu Tharjiath, at Branch’s mother’s house.

Branch “claimed Jones had been harassing and following him and that he was upset with her because of her relationship with his nephew,” according to the charges.

Both of the men were wearing ankle monitors because each was on pretrial release for a felony case, the charging document says.

Ankle monitor data showed “immediately prior to the shooting Tharjiath and Branch III were together, and that they drove to the scene together,” the charges say. “GPS data from their respective ankle monitors revealed that once at the scene, and after the shooting, Branch III went into his mother’s residence at while Tharjiath remained in the car,” the charges say.

It is not clear whether Tharjiath is also charged with a crime.

At Branch’s court hearing, Jones learned he had been out on bail in a June theft and forgery case at the time of the shooting.

Branch was also charged with third degree assault for brandishing a handgun inside a vehicle in April.

“That just made me even more mad. He should have been in jail,” Jones said.

A separate charge in which Branch was accused of threatening someone with a gun over a financial dispute was dismissed in April 2021. That case was “ultimately dismissed pursuant to Criminal Rule 5,” which is a rule that guarantees defendants a right to a speedy trial, which Alaska’s criminal justice system has struggled with during the pandemic.

Branch is being held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.

Shatara was a 10th grader at Bartlett High School, where she had recently transferred from West Anchorage High School. Born and raised in Anchorage, she was the oldest of seven kids between her mother and father. She had five sisters and one brother.

Her mom described her as a quiet, gentle caretaker of her younger siblings.

She had a precocious ability to care for herself, too: Mornings started with listening to affirmations and yoga. She ate a vegan diet, wanted to work with animals and had asked her mother for a tarantula or a snake for Christmas.

“I would tell her: There’s no 15-year-old doing the things you do,” Jones said.

Jones had Shatara when she was 17.

“She’s been the biggest part of my life,” she said.

A candlelight vigil is being held in Shatara’s honor at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, at 13th and Denali — the place where she was shot. The public is invited, Jones said. She has other friends who’ve lost children to gun violence in Anchorage. She wants it to stop.

Shatara Stone would have turned 16 on Dec. 31.

“I want everybody to know about her, see her face and remember her, the way she was.”