Fight turns deadly in Mountain View apartment

The victim, Robert Christensen, suffered a wound to the chest during the altercation, which was witnessed by a number of people at the four-plex in the 600 block of North Klevin Street, police said.

"Officers attempted to give him CPR on the scene, and he died there," police Lt. Dave Parker said.

Christensen is from Wasilla but had been staying at the Anchorage home where the shooting occurred for about a week, Parker said. A little after 1 a.m., a physical disturbance broke out there, and someone at the home reported the shooting at 1:16 a.m.

"I don't know why they were going after each other. We know that there was a fight, but that was about it," Parker said. "There is no indication that anyone else was targeted or hit."

On Tuesday afternoon, a neighbor said he was outside smoking a cigarette a little after 1 a.m. when he heard shouting over at the apartment, whose occupants had a tendency to get rowdy.

"That's pretty much when I heard them say, 'Get the hell out of here,' " he said. He went inside, then heard several gunshots, he said. "A couple of them were clustered together. Then I had that heart-sinking feeling -- 'Oh, no.' "

A man who answered the door Tuesday afternoon at the site of the shooting, on the corner of Klevin and Parsons Avenue, declined to comment.

Christensen's mother, Pam Lashley, said from her home in Nikiski that her son worked for AAA Moving and took a bus to his father's home in Wasilla but sometimes stayed with his friend at the Mountain View apartment.

"I talked to him yesterday and was telling him that he should go to Wasilla and stay there," Lashley said. "I didn't think Anchorage was a good place for him."

Christensen's brother, Julien Harris, 15, said the friend called his family Tuesday morning and told them what happened. A group had apparently been hanging out at the home when Christensen's friend told one of them to leave for reasons that weren't immediately clear, he said.

"The owner of the house asked them to leave and he got mad about it and he pulled out a gun," he said. "He tried to kill him and my brother stepped in front of him."

The suspects took off on foot, without a vehicle, according to police. Police did not release a description of them.

A number of the people who witnessed the crime, including those who lived at the apartment, were brought in to be questioned, Parker said. No one was arrested Tuesday and police had not taken any suspects into custody.

Court records indicate Christensen had been charged in three driving-under-the-influence cases and for violating his conditions of release. Those appeared to be his only criminal cases in Alaska.

The shooting brings the number of homicide investigations to 13 to date this year, surpassing the 12 homicides in Anchorage for all of 2008 -- which was one of the lowest counts in city history.

In one of the 13 this year, however -- the May 28 shooting of 29-year-old Eric Nielson -- police have not been able to conclusively determine whether the shooting was a homicide or a suicide, Parker said. That case remains under investigation.

Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.