Man invokes Maurice Clemmons in threats to Lakewood police, prosecutors say

Lakewood police responding to a domestic incident arrived to a man who invoked Maurice Clemmons’ name while threatening to kill them Thursday, Pierce County prosecutors say.

The 36-year-old Lakewood man was charged Friday in Pierce County Superior Court with felony harassment, obstructing police and resisting arrest. He was ordered held in lieu of $10,000 bail.

According to charging documents:

Police were sent to a trailer park for a domestic dispute involving a woman and two men about 6 a.m. Thursday.

They arrived to find a man with his arm around the neck of a woman near one of the trailers and spoke with them.

The man is immediately standoffish, wanting to know why police were there. The two officers said they were responding to a domestic incident and wanted to talk to each party individually.

The woman was crying but didn’t say anything, and the man refused to leave. One officer asked the man to leave six times so he could talk with the woman, and each time the man refused.

The officer then told the man he could be detained for obstructing an officer, and the man replied by cursing the officer and saying “I know my rights.”

The officers struggled with the man and eventually detained him. The man refused to be searched before being placed in the police car, then refused to sit in the car’s seat. It took one of the officers going to the other side of the car and physically pulling him into it before the man was seated.

The man said he was hurt and West Pierce Fire & Rescue firefighters were brought out to the trailer park. The man yelled at him, but firefighters cleared him to be taken to jail.

The woman told police she wasn’t the victim of domestic violence.

“That is just how he is,” she said. “He has mental problems and hates the police.”

He made that hatred evident on way to the jail.

The man began to threaten to punch the officer “right in the ... face” when he got out of jail.

In the 40 minutes it took to take the man to Nisqually Jail, the man made a series of escalating statements:

▪ “When I get out, I will find you and knock you out.”

▪ “You don’t know who you have in your back seat … I’m an (expletive) time bomb.”

▪ “I am going to get out, call my homies, and we are going to find you and kill you.”

▪ “You can’t hide. I will find you on the Internet, find where you live and come to shoot you and your family.”

▪ “Maurice Clemmons was a friend and he took out four of you and he was an idiot … I’m a smart (expletive), and I will kill you, your family and a whole lot more of you.”

Clemmons is the man who fatally shot four Lakewood police officers at a Parkland coffee shop on Nov. 29, 2009. He was fatally shot by police two days later in Seattle.

The officer said he took the threats seriously because of the man’s hostility toward police, the graphic details he used and his “obvious mental instability,” prosecutors wrote.

While being taken to the jail, the man spit and urinated throughout the back seat of the patrol car.

This story was originally published October 14, 2017 at 3:53 PM with the headline "Man invokes Maurice Clemmons in threats to Lakewood police, prosecutors say."