How long did deputies take to respond to Tuesday stabbings on the Key Peninsula?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Deputies arrived about 50 minutes after a caller reported a no-contact order violation.
- Police say that dispatchers prioritize calls based on type and information in the call.
- Officials said CAD logs may provide context for calls they received before stabbings.
How long did it take deputies to arrive after a 911 caller reported a man stabbing people outside homes on the Key Peninsula?
In the days following the tragic incident in the 14000 block of 87th Avenue Court Northwest, which left five dead, Key Peninsula residents and others have questioned why it took deputies around 50 minutes to reach the scene after the first caller reported a man entering a home in violation of a protection order Tuesday morning. A deputy shot and killed the 32-year-old suspect three minutes after calls about the stabbings came in later, as reported by the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies received the first call about the order violation at around 8:41 a.m., realized the order had not yet been served and were en route to serve it when they received the stabbing calls at 9:30 a.m. They reported a deputy had fired shots at 9:33 a.m., the Sheriff’s Office said.
Officials have not identified the victims or the suspect, but The News Tribune reported that court records and those close to the suspect identified Zoya Shablykina, 52, as one of the victims and the suspect as her 32-year-old son, Aleksandr Shablykin, who had recent mental health challenges. A GoFundMe fundraiser for the family said that the three others killed were neighbors who had tried to help.
Concerns circulating on social media about the response times reflect frustrations that have circulated in recent months about sheriff deputy staffing in rural areas of Pierce County, including the Key Peninsula. The Peninsula Detachment, which serves the Key Peninsula and areas of unincorporated Pierce County outside of Gig Harbor, is one of three rural detachments under the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office and has a minimum of two deputies working at any one time, though the numbers can fluctuate above that.
“People are really upset about the response from the sheriff’s department, a lot of people,” Pamela Cumbie, a Key Peninsula resident of over 30 years, told The News Tribune. “We have two (deputies) for the whole entire KP, and I don’t think any of us feel like we’re safe. You know, we call them, and it takes a while for them to respond.”
Cumbie runs a private Facebook group for Key Peninsula residents that has about 6,000 members. She doesn’t live in the neighborhood where the stabbings occurred but has a home nearby. She went on to say that she doesn’t blame the Sheriff’s Office “in any way, shape or form,” knowing they have procedures to follow. She wants to start a discussion with other residents about what can be done to get more deputies in their area, she said.
One of the neighbors who witnessed the stabbings, who spoke with The News Tribune on Wednesday on the condition of anonymity, said that he likened the initial call to one about a trespass or disorderly conduct, “which, you know, in this area, you are not going to get a fast response for a trespass or a disorderly.” After reporting a violent crime such as a stabbing, he said: “You will now get everybody to show up.”
It remained unclear as of Thursday how many deputies were on duty in the Peninsula Detachment, where they were or what calls they might have been responding to when the first call came in. Pierce County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Carly Cappetto told The News Tribune that Tacoma Police Department spokesperson Shelbie Boyd is handling questions about the case because the Sheriff’s Office is an involved agency in the shooting that killed the suspect.
In a phone call Wednesday, Boyd said she “really can’t speak to the specific case anymore” until the Pierce County Force Investigation Team, a multi-agency law enforcement team that investigates officers’ use of deadly force, puts out another news release Friday. The News Tribune can request public records of CAD logs showing what calls officers were responding to that morning, she said.
The News Tribune received records of CAD logs this week showing that deputies in the Peninsula Detachment received two calls between the call about the protection order violation at 8:41 a.m. and the stabbing calls at 9:30 am. CAD logs specific to the protection order violation and the stabbings have not yet been released.
The first call, which came in at 9:01 a.m., appears to have been for a fire unit response to an alarm that went off at a children’s camp in Longbranch, YMCA Camp Colman. It was cleared as a false alarm two minutes later.
The second call came in at 9:30 a.m. for a general animal complaint at an address that appears to be on Fox Island. It was resolved on arrival and cleared at 10:24 a.m., the logs show.
Boyd offered to speak in generalities about how dispatchers and officers prioritize different types of calls. It depends on what information is included in the call, she said. For example, if someone calls 911 and says someone who isn’t supposed to contact them is in front of their house, South Sound 911 will prioritize that call “based on what else is going on” and the type of call that it is, Boyd said.
“And then the next thing is, ‘He’s banging on my door, he’s kicking my door, he’s saying X, Y and Z, he’s trying to break my window,’ those are things that will cause the dispatcher to escalate the priority of the call,” she said.
When police get a call about an order violation, “the charge is to gather as much information as we can about that call while en route to the call,” she continued.
When a call comes in to 911, the call taker transfers the information to a dispatcher, who communicates with law enforcement, Boyd explained. The call taker and dispatcher enter the information from the call into a system that officers can see, and many factors can influence how quickly an officer responds.
“So when the call comes in, the dispatcher writes everything, and they put it on the screen,” Boyd said. “What else was going on on that day that that call came in? Like were these individuals officers or deputies? Were they on other calls? How many did you have in service? What other priorities may have been on the screen? And so there’s the time the call comes in, and then there’s the time when you’re actually dispatched to the call, because the call could sit on the screen for a half an hour, an hour before you’re even dispatched as an officer.”
The News Tribune previously reported Sheriff’s Office data in 2024 showing that deputies take longer on average to respond to priority one calls, which are calls with the highest level of urgency, in the rural detachments than in the county’s Central Patrol division, which serves urban areas such as South Hill. The three rural detachments are the Peninsula Detachment; the Mountain Detachment serving areas near Graham, Roy, McKenna, Elk Plain, Kapowsin, Eatonville, Elbe and Ashford; and the Foothills Detachment, serving areas near Lake Tapps, Bonney Lake, Prairie Ridge, Orting, Buckley, Wilkeson and Greenwater.
Priority one calls are typically emergency situations in progress, like shootings or aggravated assaults. In 2024, deputies took an average of 5.3 minutes to arrive to a Central Patrol call compared to 11.6 minutes in the Peninsula Detachment, The News Tribune reported. Deputies took an average of 9.2 minutes to reach a priority one call in the Foothills Detachment and 10.6 minutes in the Mountain Detachment.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include information from CAD logs for the Peninsula Detachment Tuesday morning.
Staff reporter Debbie Cockrell contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
