Charges: Meth-fueled hallucinations led to Eagle River’s neighbor-on-neighbor shooting spree

Anchorage Police Department downtown headquarters on June 9, 2020 (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)

An Eagle River man is charged with shooting his sleeping neighbor through the neighbor’s bedroom window while on meth early Thursday.

Anchorage police say an officer shot the suspect, 57-year-old Todd Driskill, after Driskill fired at responding officers. Both Driskill and his neighbor are expected to survive.

Driskill faces multiple charges of assault and weapons misconduct.

Related: Police shoot Eagle River neighborhood gunman who injured 1

According to a charging document, after Driskill was released from a hospital, he told detectives he’d been smoking methamphetamine prior to the shooting. He said he started seeing “holograms” of people that he was playing games with, which is why he started shooting his rifle, and that he thought his neighbors were shining lights into his house.

According to the charges, one man told police he heard the gunshots and thought there might be a bear in the neighborhood. The charges say the man Driskill is accused of shooting was asleep, lying in bed with his wife when a bullet struck his leg, and they jumped up, hid in a bathroom and called 911. Another neighbor reported having a verbal confrontation with Driskill in which the rifle-wielding man was screaming and not making any sense.

The first responding officers found Driskill on his roof, still firing shots, some of which the officers believed were at them, the charges say. Shortly thereafter, an officer shot Driskill.

The charges say Driskill was wide-eyed and showed “extremely erratic behavior” on the ride to the hospital. Police arrested Driskill upon his release from the hospital.

He was set for an initial court appearance Friday.

Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him at cgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Casey here

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