‘We can’t forget him.’ Family awaits justice 7 years after Tacoma man’s shooting death
The 2015 fatal shooting of Steven Speakman on Tacoma’s Hilltop sent waves of grief through a community that knew the young man for his frequent walks through the neighborhood, his friendly smile and eagerness to lend a helping hand.
After more than seven years, detectives are no closer to piecing together what happened to Speakman the morning of Nov. 3 when the 26-year-old man was found dead from gunshot wounds outside a business on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, just steps away from his apartment. Still, family and relatives say that every day since, they’ve held out hope that justice will find those responsible.
“He was a good young man, he didn’t deserve this,” Stephanie Dahlberg, Speakman’s auntie, said in a news conference Thursday. “There’s somebody out there who knows what happened to him. So we ask that you please come forward. Bare this from your soul. Do the right thing.”
The Tacoma police briefed reporters on Speakman’s death at department headquarters in the hopes that revisiting the case might lead to new information. Detective Julie Dier said leads have led nowhere, any surveillance footage from the area has proved unhelpful, and the weapon used in the shooting was never recovered. She said the lead investigator on the case retired several years ago.
Solving Speakman’s case only becomes more difficult as years go by. Dier said people might forget what happened, surveillance video becomes lost and evidence once left on cell phones can disappear.
“We want to find justice, and we want to find closure for families,” Dier said. “These individuals, they don’t deserve to be deprived of their life, and their families do not deserve to be deprived of their loved ones.”
Detectives believe one person killed Speakman, but Dier said more might have been involved. He was found by a neighbor at about 6:15 a.m. at 1014 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and neighbors reported hearing gunshots about 20 minutes earlier. According to previous reporting from The News Tribune, it didn’t seem likely to investigators that he’d been the victim of a robbery. Speakman still had his cellphone and wallet.
At the time, Speakman was living on his own in an apartment just across the hall from his mother, Kimberly Nystrom. She said it was normal for him to be out walking early in the morning.
He graduated from Foss High School in 2008. Speakman was intellectually disabled and functioned at the level of a 10-year-old, which kept him from working, but it didn’t stop him from helping out wherever he went. Neighbors and local business owners have said Speakman regularly stopped into storefronts to chat or help out by vacuuming or running an errand.
“Steven was a very loving child,” Nystrom said. “Everyone knew him.”
His older sister, Selina Ramirez, was out of Speakman’s life back in 2015, she said, but family keeps his memory alive now by sharing stories, coming together for balloon releases at the site of his death and keeping photographs of him in their homes. Ramirez, 43, has an eagle feather tattooed on her forearm that bears her brother’s name.
Knowing that almost nothing has surfaced in the case in the past seven years is difficult, Ramirez said. She fears that whoever has that information might have taken it to the grave. Ramirez said even knowing if that were true would be some closure.
“We can’t forget him,” Dahlberg, said. “He was too sweet of a soul on this Earth to let him be forgotten.”
Anyone with information regarding this crime is asked to contact Crime Stoppers online or by calling 1-800-222-TIPS.
