Anchorage police recorded 45 outdoor deaths in Alaska's largest city in 2025, according to recent reporting by the Anchorage Daily News.
That's defined as people dying outside who had no fixed address.
And while 2025 saw slightly fewer than the 50 outdoor deaths that occurred in each of the two prior years -- creating a grim tie for what is thought to be the all-time high -- there were still many more than the past.
Anchorage Daily News reporter Michelle Theriault Boots compiled the data and personal stories behind the city's outdoor deaths, and she says there are some surprises -- and heartbreak -- in the numbers.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Theriault Boots: The numbers were 19, 20, to 26ish people per year, and then in 2023 that really shot up, to 50 people. And that was an extreme change. I don't know that there's a consensus on what drove that change, but at the time, and I think now, people do say that that's when we had a lot of instability in sheltering. So that was an era when we had a big winter shelter, and then the winter shelter would go away, and people would be turned out to camp across the city. We saw lots of that. We saw some very large camping sites.
And also, somewhat counterintuitively, what we've learned from the data is that the months with the highest outdoor deaths tend to actually be the summer months, and some shoulder season months like April and October also have historically had high numbers of deaths. And the reason for that, experts say, is that those were times when people were more likely to be out camping. They were less likely to be in shelter. Issues like drugs and alcohol were much more present, possibly, in those out-of-sight or out-of-a-shelter camp situations.
Casey Grove: Yeah, I think people would be surprised to hear that in the summer months there are actually more deaths. But even if there's no consensus, what are some of the common things that you see?
MTB: Yeah, well, in about 46% of the cases in 2025 police reported finding some kind of drug or alcohol paraphernalia at the scene when the person died. And several years ago, we had the State Medical Examiner's Office do a multi-year analysis of outdoor deaths for us, and at that time, they put hypothermia, complications from alcohol and drug overdoses as the most frequent causes of death.
Geographically, these people are found all over the municipality. I mean, truly. Typically, more men than women. The ages range a lot. I would say in the last few years, when we've seen these really elevated numbers, we've seen a surprising number, a lot of quite young people, people in their 20s and 30s, even, who are found dead outside.
I think what these numbers say is that, though we've moved from a time in some years when there's been really unstable shelter, like the shelters closing and people going off to camp, into a more year-round, stable shelter system, the numbers are persistently high. You know, we had two years of 50 deaths, and this year, in 2025, there were 45. So that number is going down slightly, but it's not a massive change. And so, I don't know, I think experts are looking at that to try to figure out, what is keeping that number high?
And one person I spoke to, Shawn Hays, the head of Henning Incorporated, which operates a couple different transitional housing and shelter programs, she really attributed it to fentanyl. Fentanyl is so omnipresent, so cheap and so deadly and potent, that she saw that as potentially a contributing factor to keeping this number high.
CG: Which, I mean, my understanding is that's not very different from a lot of cities that are dealing with this opioid crisis and then a lot more unhoused people in recent years, right?
MTB: Yeah, I think the nexus between the opioid crisis, fentanyl and homelessness continues to be a really major factor.
CG: So you mentioned Henning Incorporated and their representative you spoke to. What was the city of Anchorage's take on this when you asked them?
MTB: I think the city of Anchorage said, you know, their take was that these numbers are still very high, but they do represent a decrease from last year. And they kind of made that point about the stability of shelter and hopefully that the long-term efforts there will see this number continue to be reducing. And they also made the point that we know that people are most at risk when they are in the woods, out of shelter, obviously.
CG: We're talking about statistics here, and some numbers, the 45 people that passed away outside in Anchorage in 2025, But, unfortunately, you've had to do this story a few times, right? And every time, I think you do a really good job of telling human stories about at least a couple of the people on your list. And I wanted to ask you, why is that important to you? And then, how do you go about doing that?
MTB: Yeah, I think first it's important to talk about why report this? Why do we keep reporting on this, you know, outdoor deaths? Well, I think that the reason is, while it's an imperfect measure, as we've talked about, it's something that city leaders past and present have called an important measure of how the city is caring for its vulnerable people. No one wants to see unhoused people dying on sidewalks, dying outside in our city, right? And so while it doesn't reveal everything about the welfare of unhoused people, we agree as a community it's something we do not want to be happening.
And I always, when I read these lists, I very much think about every single person on this list is someone's family member. And I want to know as much as I can about these people, who they were, and so I always look up, I do a little bit of research, on every single person. And I often find obituaries. I often find things about what they were doing in their life, past jobs, past careers, maybe a social media presence. So things that give me a little window into who these people were and the idea that this person died outside homeless does not mean they did not have a loving family that was very concerned about them.
There was a couple that passed away together. They had been reported missing, and their families had been organizing search parties, even flying into Anchorage, going out and searching for them for months, and they were ultimately found to have passed away in a tent that was ultimately covered in snow and not found until much later.
One person I spoke to in reporting this story was the sister of a young man named Troy Jacko, who was found dead in 2025 outside. And she talked a little bit about how he was from the Bristol Bay area, had kind of spent much of his life in Anchorage and really wanted to be a good uncle, always carried around a picture of her daughter in his wallet. That was really important to him.
He was a skateboarder, snowboarder, an artist. And after she found that he passed away, she couldn't get a lot of details, and she really wanted to find his notebooks that had his drawings and things in them. And just hearing a little bit about (how) this was someone's beloved brother, whose life, it sounds like, became clouded with addiction, and that made for some hard times with his family. But she wanted to share about who he was and a picture of him, and I want people to be remembered for more than the way they died.
