Puyallup official said she was victim of threats. Police suggest she made it up
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Police concluded investigation early this year, started investigating in June 2025.
- Phone records and FBI analysis raised police doubts about threats, report says.
- Prosecutor declined to file charges — couldn't prove beyond reasonable doubt.
Last year, the chair of Puyallup’s planning commission said she experienced death threats after controversy erupted over the city’s comprehensive plan.
Now, police say she lied about threatening phone calls she said she received during the investigation.
In an interview with The News Tribune in August 2025, the now-former chair of the city’s planning commission, Kenya Jones-Lowell, said she received a threatening letter in her mailbox.
Jones-Lowell, who is Black, previously shared the letter with The News Tribune. The letter — which Jones-Lowell said she found in her mailbox June 5 — contained racial slurs, death threats, the threat of sexual violence and other obscenities. She also told The News Tribune she received two threatening robocalls, with one of them happening July 23, one day after the council voted on the controversial plan.
A police report obtained by The News Tribune through a public records request alleges that Jones-Lowell lied about the nature of the robocalls. That report was first obtained by public-records activist Arthur West, who sent it to The News Tribune for review.
The police department sent its case to prosecutors for review, and the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office told The News Tribune it does not plan to pursue false-reporting charges against Jones-Lowell.
The News Tribune was not able to reach Jones-Lowell directly for this story. Her lawyer, John Cummings, pushed back on the allegations, saying Jones-Lowell is “the victim of unsolved racist harassment.”
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“She agrees that there is no evidence that she engaged in false reporting. She told the truth to the police. But that never should have been the question,” Cummings wrote in an email to The News Tribune on Friday. “Ms. Jones is and has been a victim of crime.”
The police report details the course of the investigation, which spanned from June 9, 2025 — when Jones-Lowell first reported the threats to the police department — to Jan. 14, 2026, when the police department sent the report to the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to review the case for possible false reporting charges.
In the report, the police department cited several factors that led to its conclusion, including:
- Phone records that allegedly show scripts of the phone calls Jones-Lowell called threatening, which the department said were not threatening.
- An alleged lack of video evidence that shows Jones-Lowell retrieving the letter from her mailbox.
- An FBI behavioral analysis of the letter, which the report says came back as likely written by her or “someone acting on her behalf.”
“A considerable amount of time and effort went into this investigation. I’m extremely proud of the work our department did in this,” Scott Engle, chief of the Puyallup Police Department, told The News Tribune on Friday. “Our job is to find the facts and seek the truth, and our department has faithfully and impartially delivered on that duty.”
Adam Faber, spokesperson for the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, shared a memo with The News Tribune on Thursday that said the office does not believe it would be able to prove in court that Jones-Lowell “knowingly or willfully” lied to police.
“We are unable to prove criminal allegations of false reporting beyond a reasonable doubt,” the office wrote.
Puyallup Mayor Ned Witting issued a statement on the case Friday.
“A death threat made against a Puyallup public official understandably alarmed members of our community. Such a threat against a public servant must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and that is exactly what occurred,” Witting wrote in a statement to The News Tribune.
Witting praised the police department for its handling of the investigation, saying officers “spared no time, energy or expense in their effort to determine the source of the threat.”
“Puyallup is a community that values truth, fairness, and neighborly respect. This fabrication directly undermined these fundamental principles,” Witting wrote. “Whatever the motivations behind this hoax, we cannot let it undermine our community spirit. Now is the time when we need to come together and celebrate our diversity, our civility, and our neighborliness.”
Witting told The News Tribune that Jones-Lowell is not on the planning commission anymore. During its Feb. 24, 2026 meeting, the city council appointed new people to the commission. Planning commissioners are unpaid volunteers appointed by the city to serve four-year terms that expire on the first Tuesday of March in the last year.
Jones-Lowell had been on the commission since March 2022. Witting said she didn’t reapply for a second term. Vice chair Tracy Taylor is the new chair, Witting said, with Commissioner David De Groot serving as the new vice chair.
What threats did Jones-Lowell allegedly receive?
Jones-Lowell previously told The News Tribune she received unusual texts in May 2025 that tried to get her to confirm her address. On June 5, she said she went to her mailbox and allegedly found a letter folded up with the rest of her mail.
“The comp plan will pass and end all of you,” part of the letter reads.
It goes on to say that “we will make Puyallup great again,” that “Black lives do not matter here,” and it describes ways that Jones-Lowell could be killed.
According to the police report, she reported the letter to authorities on June 9. Kaleb Johnson, the detective on the case, wrote that he asked Jones-Lowell why she waited to report it.
“... the office at the police station was closed at 4:30 p.m., so she decided to wait until the following Monday,” Johnson wrote. “I assured her she could report emergency and non-emergency calls at any time of the day or week and patrol would respond.”
Jones-Lowell previously told The News Tribune that she received two threatening phone calls. According to the police report, Jones-Lowell said she received these calls on July 2 and July 23.
She submitted statements to the police about the calls, which are included in the police report. In the reports, she said the first call started with a beep, and then a “masculine recorded voice [started] to say threatening things.”
“They stated my name, and say that they have been hired to take action against me. The caller called me a slur and threatened to bring a lawsuit against me if I don’t stop,” Jones-Lowell wrote. “I don’t recall saying anything to the caller at the time of the call.”
The July 23 call, which happened the day after the city passed the comprehensive plan, sounded “taunting,” Jones-Lowell wrote.
“They mentioned that the CoP Comprehensive Plan had passed and that they knew that council would do what was right ... . I hung up,” Jones-Lowell wrote.
In a spreadsheet she shared with Johnson, Jones-Lowell also allegedly noted July 31 that the locks on the front door of her house had been “tampered with.”
Jones-Lowell left the city for several weeks, she previously told The News Tribune, extending a family trip because of the alleged threats.
“It’s terrifying,” she told The News Tribune in August. “We’ve really changed our routines a lot, I think. We’re just hyperaware. It’s very, very stressful.”
What happened during the investigation?
According to the report, Johnson looked over the texts Jones-Lowell received in May asking her to confirm her address and said they “seemed to be random spam.”
Johnson submitted the letter to Pierce County Forensics in June to identify fingerprints.
Two unidentified fingerprints and one palmprint remain unidentified.
At the beginning of the investigation, Jones-Lowell gave officers footage from her Ring camera which shows the mailbox, according to the report. Johnson later submitted a search warrant to Ring to get all the clips from her camera between May 26 and June 6.
In the report, Johnson said the clips repeatedly showed Jones-Lowell, her husband and her sister taking out the trash but not them returning inside the house. When he asked Jones-Lowell if it was possible for someone to put something inside her mailbox without it setting off the motion-activated sensor on the camera, she said it was possible depending on how the person approached.
Johnson then listed all the clips that showed up on the camera footage in that time frame — none of which showed Jones-Lowell receiving the letter, he wrote.
“The delivery of the threatening letter was not conclusively captured on the residential surveillance camera, even though it is set up to record everyone approaching the door,” Johnson wrote in the report. “The videos also did not show anyone retrieving the mail during the specified time frame.”
When Jones-Lowell reported the threatening calls, Johnson said in the report that he reviewed the phone numbers and filed search warrants to Flowroute and AT&T, the companies that service the numbers.
Flowroute gave Johnson the name of the phone number owner, the report said, and Johnson called him.
“[He] was able to quickly discern the number had been in use by a client of his, a debt collector,” Johnson wrote in the report. “... After some research with them, he told me the phone call was an automated message made to Kenya Jones (I had not previously told him this name).”
The owner then submitted a script of the call to Johnson, the report said, which verified the call was from a debt collector.
For the second call, AT&T told Johnson the number Jones-Lowell provided was a “‘behind-the-scene routing number” and that Jones-Lowell “could not have received a call from [the number] on that day.”
Jones-Lowell then told Johnson she lost her phone in August, the report said, so Johnson filed a search warrant for T-Mobile for Jones-Lowell’s phone records. T-Mobile then told Johnson that Jones-Lowell never received an incoming call from that phone number but did try to call it.
“In conclusion, Kenya never actually received a phone call from [the number]. Rather, she attempted to make one that did not go through,” Johnson wrote in the report.
Johnson met with Jones-Lowell and Cummings in November, the report said. During that meeting, Johnson showed Jones-Lowell the script from the first phone number, showing it was a debt collector, and her phone records that showed she never received a call from the second phone number. Jones-Lowell allegedly maintained that the calls were threatening her.
Aside from a brief mention, the report does not bring up Jones-Lowell’s allegation that someone had tampered with the locks on her house. The News Tribune asked Engle about that allegation.
“I think the lock thing was something that was mentioned early on,” Engle said. “Nothing else was given to us other than [the entry on the spreadsheet]. There was no substance to that.”
In the report, Johnson also noted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ran a behavioral analysis “to try to ascertain a criminal profile for the person who wrote the letter.”
The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) allegedly told Johnson there were “a lot of unusual things about the letter.”
At the end of the report, Johnson wrote that the FBI’s analysis concluded “that the letter was most likely generated by her or someone acting on her behalf.”
The News Tribune reached out to the FBI’s Seattle field office to ask how behavioral analysis reports work, and what factors led the bureau to conclude that Jones-Lowell or someone close to her had written the letter.
“Although Behavioral Analysis Units (BAU) have coordinators in the FBI field offices, this program is managed in Quantico. We would not be able to provide specifics about this particular example,” Amy Alexander, spokesperson for the FBI, wrote in an email to The News Tribune.
The News Tribune then asked who the best contact person for the case would be, and Alexander looped in an email address for the FBI’s National Press Office but said “they will not be able to discuss this specific example either.”
Alexander gave The News Tribune a link to a post on the FBI website, which describes the general practice of how behavioral analysis units work. According to their website, investigators conduct a behavioral analysis report by analyzing factors like someone’s pattern of thinking, behavior, “motivation, victim selection, sophistication level, actions, and relationships to that particular crime, along with the sequence of events.”
‘I’m certain what was fact and what wasn’t.’
In an interview with The News Tribune, Engle said one of the key factors in the department’s false-reporting allegations are the threatening phone calls Jones-Lowell said she received.
“We know who those phone calls were, we know what numbers they were called from, and we know what was said during those phone calls,” Engle said. “Without any shadow of a doubt, it’s our perspective that her claim in the statement to the detective during the investigation that she had received two threatening phone calls is absolutely false.”
Engle said things are murkier when it comes to the letter that Jones-Lowell allegedly received in her mailbox.
“Were we presented a letter with threats on it? Absolutely. Do we believe that was put in Kenya’s mailbox? We don’t know,” Engle said. “I think there’s some doubt about that, and we certainly don’t know who the author of that is at this time.”
When The News Tribune asked Engle about the FBI report, he said he couldn’t give specifics for how the FBI came to its conclusions, but that the FBI’s report did affirm what the department suspected.
“We don’t rely on that for our sole source of information, the only thing in the case,” Engle said. “But as we got into this investigation and other things were not adding up … the FBI supports what our investigation found.”
Engle emphasized that he is proud of the work the department did.
“This is a sad situation all the way around, a troubling situation all the way around,” Engle said. “We gave everything to get to the bottom of this, and I’m certain what was fact and what wasn’t.”
Why is the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office not pursuing charges?
In a memo shared with The News Tribune, the Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office said it considered the following misdemeanor charges regarding the phone calls:
- Making a false or misleading statement to a public servant
- False reporting
- Obstructing a law enforcement officer
It won’t pursue those charges, the office said, because prosecutors don’t believe they would be able to prove in court that she intentionally made false statements.
“There is simply no way to conclusively disprove that Ms. Jones simply mixed-up numbers or accidentally provided the wrong numbers,” the memo said. “Although we don’t find it particularly persuasive, the defense could easily raise a reasonable doubt and defeat a false reporting charge arguing (or by Ms. Jones testifying) that she must have been mixed up.”
The prosecutor’s office also said the lack of footage of her receiving the letter is not sufficient evidence to show that she lied about the letter’s creation.
“Based on the review of the Ring video and on further interviews with Mr. Jones, it is clear that the Ring camera does not consistently capture images of persons near the mailbox. Someone could have placed the letter or removed the letter from the box without being captured on the camera,” the memo said. “Ms. Jones could have retrieved it as she reported without being captured on camera. It is also pertinent that people can easily activate or deactivate their security camera systems.”
‘It is awful to be a victim of crime’
In an email to The News Tribune on Friday, Cummings said Jones-Lowell was telling the truth about the harassment she experienced.
“She was targeted due to her advocacy for an equitable and inclusive Puyallup,” Cummings wrote. “... It is awful to be a victim of crime: it is worse to then be called ‘absurd’ and treated like the perpetrator by the authorities that are supposed to be keeping you safe. That’s called victim blaming, and it is why so many crimes go unreported.”
Cummings said Jones-Lowell’s efforts to “make the Comprehensive Plan more equitable and inclusive” led to her being on the other end of racist attacks.
“The racist letter Ms. Jones received in this case is not the only act of violence that she has faced due to her advocacy. A car at her home has been vandalized, and her locks have been tampered with. The report of the racist letter is but one way she has been targeted for her inclusivity efforts,” Cummings wrote.
The News Tribune asked Engle about the allegation that a car at Jones-Lowell’s home had been vandalized. He was unfamiliar with the claim and said the department had not received any reports of car damage.
“Victims of crime should be able to report crimes without fear of victim blaming or — worse — being charged with a crime,” Cummings wrote. “When a person asks for help from authorities, she should not have to worry that ... she may be charged with a crime just for asking the authorities to keep her safe.”
Why was the comprehensive plan controversial?
The Planning Commission, which Jones-Lowell headed, worked on the city’s comprehensive plan for about a year. The comprehensive plan encompasses the city’s vision and plan over the next 20 years. Cities are required to have a comprehensive plan under Washington’s Growth Management Act.
Jones-Lowell previously told The News Tribune the commission started work on the plan in fall 2023 and presented the plan to the city council in December 2024. Council reviewed the plan and made changes that would later lead to criticism from residents, including:
- Replacing the word “equity” with “equality” in many sections, a language change that is at the heart of a national debate.
- Removing a policy that requires the city to analyze climate-change impacts while building new structures.
- Language that would require the city to follow federal executive orders, even if they clash with state law.
- Changing a paragraph in the housing section of the plan that lists race as a barrier to housing equity.
- Changing a paragraph about the city’s history with the Puyallup Tribe. The change removes language implying the tribe was forced to leave its land.
Opponents of the changes said they make Puyallup less inclusive and put the city at odds with state law.
On July 22, the council voted 4-3 to pass the plan with the controversial changes. Then-Mayor Jim Kastama and council members Dennis King, Dean Johnson and Renne Gilliam voted to pass it while Witting, council member Lauren Adler and then-council member Julie Door rejected it.
In a speech at the July 22 meeting, Kastama said he stood by the changes and that “race-neutral terminology aligns with both Washington state law and the U.S. Constitution.”
Jones-Lowell previously told The News Tribune that her “recommendations on all comprehensive plan matters are consistent” with the recommendations the commission originally gave to the city council.
The comprehensive plan has since been sent to the Puget Sound Regional Council. Robin Koskey, spokesperson for the PSRC, told The News Tribune in an email that the Growth Management Policy Board recommended certifying the plan during its Feb. 19 meeting, and that the organization’s executive board is expected to make a decision about the plan at its March 26 meeting.
News Tribune archives contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 17, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
