Anchorage Daily News

The double shooting in an East Anchorage condo that left one man dead and his roommate critically injured remains a mystery with few leads, Anchorage police said Wednesday.

Killed in the shooting was 22-year-old Travis Villa. His roommate, Morgan Meadows, 20, was shot and transported to a hospital in critical condition. Officials were concerned he wouldn’t survive, police Lt. Paul Honeman said.

Villa’s mother, Annette Villa, said by phone from Soldotna she heard the news Wednesday morning after text messages made their way to one of her eight children.

“I was very upset,” she said. “It’s been quite a shock. It’s been pretty crazy. We just got done telling all our kids, so it was a pretty big deal.”

The men were shot in the head and chest about 10 p.m. Tuesday inside their home at the Contempo 1 Condominiums at 261 McCarrey St. Witnesses reported hearing several shots then seeing two men rush from the condo. They jumped into two separate pickups and sped off, at least one of them striking a parked car in the crowded lot.

Officers, some carrying shotguns, swarmed the neighborhood in the aftermath and eventually the SWAT team arrived to back up a few dog teams called in to sniff for leads.

The suspects were gone, but one of the vehicles — belonging to Meadows — later turned up on fire in the parking lot of Mountain View Lions Community Park, a one-minute drive from the condos on a straight drive up McCarrey. Wednesday afternoon, a police cruiser pulled into the lot to circle the pile of soot, charred speakers and bent metal that remained there.

Detectives are looking for a light-skinned black or Polynesian man in his 20s, between 5-foot-9 and 5-foot-11. Other than that description, detectives have little to go on.

“They’re pretty frustrated because they thought they had a lead on a guy that knew these guys — didn’t like them — but he’s got a good alibi that checked out. It was a bust,” Honeman said. “Basically, right now, we don’t have much of anything.”

At the scene Wednesday afternoon, a bullet hole in a window of the third-floor condo was marked with a yellow evidence tag. A blue-and-white crime scene investigation van sat parked in front of the quiet building; discarded and broken police tape littered the ground.

While the motive for Anchorage’s sixth homicide this year was unclear, it is possible that the shooter knew the victims, Honeman said.

According to court records, Meadows has only one criminal case — traffic related — in Alaska. But in his 22 years, Villa had a number of brushes with the law, including charges of underage drinking, disorderly conduct, forgery and traffic offenses, court records indicate.

Villa’s mother said he was a good man and that she couldn’t think of anyone who would do something like this. She last talked to her son Monday and he didn’t say anything about having problems. “The last thing he said was, ‘I love you, Mom,’ and I said, ‘I love you too,’ so that’s a huge comfort,” Villa said. “We’ll miss him.”

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

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