Prairie Ridge woman got protection order hours before husband killed her

A man who shot and killed his wife before fatally shooting himself at their Prairie Ridge home had been served with a protection order hours earlier, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.

The county Medical Examiner’s Office identified the couple Sunday as 40-year-old David Annas and 33-year-old Regina Annas, of the Bonney Lake area.

A 39-year-old friend of the wife who investigators say Annas also shot was recovering from her injuries and was expected to live.

“I want a divorce,” Regina Annas wrote when she filed for a protection order against her husband, in court records dated Friday. “He is nice one minute and then as soon as I say I am ready to move on he flips out and gets very mean. When he does this I get very fearful that he is going to hurt me.”

A Pierce County Superior Court judge granted a temporary order the same day, and Ed Troyer, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, said David Annas left the residence without any confrontation when the Sheriff’s Department served him with it Friday.

Hours later, deputies responded to reports of shots fired about 10:15 p.m. at the home, in the 19900 block of Rhododendron Drive, and a SWAT team found the couple dead inside and the friend shot.

Regina Annas wrote in court papers that her husband regularly showed up at the homes of her friends and parents, refusing to leave. He’d taken the vehicles they owned, she said, one of which she wanted for taking her 17-year-old son to school and for going to work.

According to the court records, he asked to talk two days before he killed her, and started driving erratically while they were in his vehicle — speeding up and slamming on the brakes — as he demanded to know why she was leaving him.

In his own petitions for restraining orders, David Annas told a different story of the couple’s troubles.

He wrote in March that his wife used methamphetamine and took her anger out on his 14-year-old daughter.

That order was canceled when he didn’t show up for a hearing. When he reapplied earlier this month, a judge said his allegations didn’t constitute domestic violence.

“My wife started using meth again and is very irritable, edgy and unstable,” he wrote in court papers dated April 8. “(She) takes her anger out on my daughter, or tries to get me to hit her by getting in my face.”

Troyer said the couple were involved in drugs and argued about them.

This story was originally published April 19, 2015 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Prairie Ridge woman got protection order hours before husband killed her."