The shocking death of Sophie Sergie crushed the hearts of her family, friends, and people she would never know. Amongst the broken hearted was her mother. For twenty-five years Elena Sergie has lived without her daughter. For twenty-five years, five more than Sophie would ever live, she was has been haunted by a question: Who murdered her girl?
During the last weekend of April 1993, Sophie Sergie, a Yupik native, flew out from her home in Pitkas Peak, Alaska to the city of Fairbanks. A year prior, the twenty-year-old lived in Fairbanks while she attended the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where she worked hard to receive a degree in marine biology. That pursuit came to a brief halt during the spring semester of her sophomore year while she recovered from an orthodontic surgery. In the meantime, Sergie kept a steady job to stay up to date on the medical bills and pay for the back-and-forth expense of visiting her Fairbanks dentist for checks-ups. She was due back for a visit on Monday, April 26th. Shirley Wasuli, a good friend, invited her to stay in her campus dorm room. Not only would it be a convenient place for Sergie to stay, but it also provided the girls an opportunity to catch up.
They spent their weekend like typical college kids. On Sunday, Wasuli’s boyfriend joined them for dinner, and then they returned to her dorm room to just hang out. The young woman lived on the second floor in Bartlett Hall. Midnight approached. Sergie excused herself for a quick cigarette break. The night was cold, much to be cold to be standing outside for too long, and so Wasuli recommended that her friend tried smoking near a vent in the girls' bathroom. An hour passed by with no trace of Sergie. Wasuli and her boyfriend moved to his dorm room, where they planned to spend the night. Before leaving, she scribbled a quick note to Sergie, saying where they went, and fastened it to the door. When she returned the following morning, the note remained in place, seemingly unread. The dorm looked as if it had been untouched as well.
Monday drove on in its usual pace. Students left their dorm rooms and headed off to class. With only a few weeks left until finals, they were eager to soak in every bit of information before the big test days. It wasn‘t until the afternoon when life at UAF would change forever. A scream pierced the walls of Bartlett Hall. Heads abruptly turned, and people glanced about, hoping to find the source of the noise. A janitor burst out from the women‘s bathroom on the second floor, looking horror-struck. He was in the middle of his cleaning routine when he discovered a badly abused body.
That body belonged to Sophie Sergie. She was found in a small, separate room inside the wash area. Someone left her in an empty tub, partially clothed, up to twelve hours prior. Stab marks covered her face, and evidence pointed to a sexual assault. The killing blow was a gunshot to the head by a .22 caliber gun.
Police swiftly put the area into a lock-down. They worked late into the evening hours, gathering as much evidence and interviewing potential witnesses. They talked with many residents of Bartlett Hall, but none remembered hearing a gun shot go off at any point during the previous night. A few students came forward to say that they last saw the victim outside, standing with a group of people as they smoked. They saw her wearing the same brightly colored hooded sweatshirt she was wearing at the time of her death.
Those who knew Sergie could not think of a single person who want to cause her harm, let alone kill her. There were no jilted former boyfriends. There were no potential enemies of any sort. In 1993, Bartlett Hall housed both male and female students, and administrators segmented each floor off to different gender. While it wasn’t considered a hazardous issue, residents sometimes found men using the women‘s bathroom. This lead many to believe that, while on her smoke break, Sergie ran into the wrong man, and for whatever reason he murdered her.
Decades passed before detectives got a hit with the DNA recovered from Sergie’s body. They did not find the preparator‘s identity within the FBI‘s database. Rather, the discovery came through a genealogy website. In July 2018, investigators turned in the evidence genetic genealogy testing so it could be cross-referenced with samples submitted to public genealogical websites. One woman’s DNA came back as a match. Detectives traced it back to her nephew, Steven Downs. Now in his forties, Downs lived in Maine where he worked as a nurse. He had no prior criminal history and appeared shocked when detectives showed up to talk to him about the Alaskan cold case. After obtaining a direct sample from Downs, police fully matched him to the DNA left on Sergie. They then charged him for the sexual assault and murder of Sophie Sergie.
Steven Downs was no stranger in this case. He attended UAF for several years and lived in Bartlett Hall at the time of the murder. During his initial interview, he said he was with his girlfriend that night in an entirely different dorm room. His name went unnoticed until 2010 when the case reopened with a set of fresh interviews for former residents of Bartlett Hall. Police talked to a man named Nicholas Dazer. Dazer stated that his roommate of that time, Steven Downs, owned a H&R .22-caliber revolver and kept it stored in their dorm room. This was the same gun that experts believed the murderer used to kill Sergie. Downs denied this claim. There was nothing more substantial to tie him to the case, but Down’s name made its way onto the suspect list.
On April 19th, 2019 the governor of Maine approved an extradition for Steven Downs.
Nearly twenty-six years have passed since her death, but in the hearts and minds of her loved ones, Sophie Sergie remains ever present. Sophie was a young woman of a brilliant mind and a brilliant heart. She was a ball of energy; always smiling and always on the move. With academics, her teachers and peers considered Sophie a force to be reckoned with, and her total enthusiasm for learning inspired them. She was kind as she was smart. The word “stranger“ could barely be found in her vocabulary. The top photograph is one of the last of Sophie. Shiley Wasuli caught this candid moment during their last weekend together, and some may consider it to be a perfect representation of her. With a radiant grin spread across her face, Sophie stands there, slightly tilted forward with her arms stretched out wide and open, ready to embrace the world.