Jury delivers verdict in shooting that killed four in Tacoma’s Salishan neighborhood
A jury found a 24-year-old man accused of fatally shooting four people in Tacoma’s Salishan neighborhood guilty Friday of four counts of aggravated first-degree murder, a conviction that guarantees him a lifetime stay in prison.
Maleke Pate had seemingly no connection to any of the people he walked up to on Oct. 21, 2021. The victims were gathered in and around a sedan behind a townhouse in Eastside Tacoma when they were each shot in quick succession and without warning. The fourth and youngest, 19-year-old Emery Iese, ran from the gunman until he was felled by a bullet to the leg. Witnesses said Iese put his hands up in surrender while Pate slowed his chase to a walk and shot the young man in the head.
The victims were Maria Nunez, 42; her son, Iese; Nunez’s brother, Raymond Williams, 22; and Williams’ girlfriend, Natasha Brincefield, 22.
Pate is to be sentenced April 11 before Pierce County Superior Court Judge Susan Adams. According to state law, anyone convicted of aggravated first-degree murder who is 18 or older shall be sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of release or parole. With multiple convictions, Pate will likely be punished with multiple life sentences.
He could appeal his conviction. Pate was represented at trial by two attorneys from the Department of Assigned Counsel, Travis Currie and Jane Melby.
No motive has been identified in killings.
Inside the courtroom packed with family members of the victims, at least one woman overcome with emotion could be seen holding her face with tissue as the verdict was read. In the hallway afterward, the family members hugged each other.
“Justice has been served and that’s closure,” Bruce Massingale, Brincefield’s step-grandfather, told The News Tribune. “Everything proved that he did it.”
Evidence presented at trial showed Pate frequented a shooting range near Puyallup in the year before the incident, and prosecutors suggested in closing arguments that the defendant left the range behind to “take it to the next level” and see what it felt like to kill real people. Jurors were shown silhouette targets Pate used as practice. Their paper heads were shot through, the same way he killed each victim.
A 9 mm handgun found in Pate’s bedroom less than a half-mile from where the shootings occurred was determined to be the murder weapon used in the shooting by ballistics experts, prosecutors said, and surveillance footage showed him fleeing the area seconds after gunfire was heard in the neighborhood.
The quadruple killing shocked Tacoma and Salishan, a diverse, mixed-income neighborhood managed by the Tacoma Housing Authority. Residents described fearing for their safety while the gunman remained at large, and many came together days after the shooting for a peace walk down neighborhood streets. Mayor Victoria Woodards attended, and participants chanted “cease fire” as a rallying cry against gun violence.
Lauvale Iese, a longtime pastor to an Eastside congregation and a father to seven children, lost his wife, a son and his brother-in-law in the shooting. He thanked all who made the verdict possible, including police, witnesses and prosecutors, as he spoke with the media — a few dozen family members mingling behind him in the hall.
“Because of who they were and their character,” he said about those lost, “we had to make noise.”
Pate’s trial was delayed three times due to repeated inquiries into his mental fitness to stand trial.
Months before the shooting, in January 2021, Pate was admitted to Wellfound Behavioural Health Hospital as “gravely disabled,” and he stayed for 10 days. The hospitalization came after his mother called a crisis line for him. Records state his parents said at the time Pate had been running out of their home “constantly,” screaming, talking nonsense and not sleeping at night.
After his arrest, Pate underwent five psychological evaluations and two 90-day terms of inpatient treatment at Western State Hospital. A Department of Social and Health Services psychologist in November 2021 diagnosed him with bipolar disorder based on interviews and his mental health history.
Evaluators wrote in court records that Pate displayed genuine psychotic symptoms in 2021 and when he was first admitted to Western State Hospital in 2022, but his most recent psych eval dated Dec. 20 found it likely Pate was exaggerating his illness. He reported hearing “hundreds” of voices at all times, experiencing hallucinations of ghosts and aliens, having memory problems and seizures, but there wasn’t evidence any of this was true.
In phone calls from Pierce County Jail, prosecutors said Pate claimed to have no memory of the date of the shooting. In one call with his sister, he said he had a prior mental breakdown. His sister reportedly disputed his mental illness, telling him any breakdown was due to him ingesting mushrooms. Prosecutors asked the court to exclude those exchanges and any of Pate’s other statements about prior mental health diagnoses from trial.
Nunez picked her son up from work at the Krispy Kreme outside the Tacoma Mall about an hour before the shooting, and the two stopped at Nunez’s mother’s house on Everett Avenue instead of going straight home.
Williams lived there with his mother. Brincefield — known by friends as Tasha — was with him that day.
Lauvale Iese told The News Tribune that while the “why” behind the shooting remained elusive, at least the verdict guaranteed that Pate couldn’t do what he did to anyone else.
“And that’s probably the closure that we’re going to have to live with,” he said.
Few other crimes have caused so much death at once in Tacoma. The lack of warning to the victims and their disconnect to Pate is reminiscent of the 2009 murders of four Lakewood police officers in a coffee shop.
One more person was killed in the 1998 Trang Dai massacre in Tacoma. The Salishan shooting also happened in a particularly violent year for Tacoma, when the city recorded 34 homicides, its highest tally since 1980. That record was shattered in 2022 when the city hit 45 killings. Last year the deaths began to ebb.
This story was originally published March 22, 2024 at 1:08 PM.
