Tacoma man jailed for 2 years on murder charges found not guilty of all counts at trial
A 38-year-old man who has been in jail for two years awaiting trial for murder in a 2022 shooting outside his Tacoma apartment complex has been found not guilty on all counts.
Evans Vailolo was arrested in October 2022, nearly two weeks after 51-year-old Gregory Hughes was shot four times when he left an apartment in the city’s South End near Pacific Avenue where he was staying with a friend and coworker to smoke outside.
Surveillance videos showed no one approached the complex within a half-hour of the 2:30 a.m. shooting, which, according to charging documents, led Tacoma Police Department detectives to believe that the gunman came from inside the apartments.
Detectives used witness descriptions of a man seen walking away from the shooting scene to identify Vailolo as a suspect, records show. Surveillance video captured a man matching Vailolo’s description walking around the parking lot with another man about 10 minutes before the shooting. The person identified as Vailolo was then seen walking away immediately after.
Since his arrest, Vailolo has been in custody at the Pierce County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail.
Jurors didn’t buy prosecutors’ case. On Thursday, the 12-person Superior Court jury acquitted Vailolo of first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder and unlawful possession of a firearm.
Vailolo’s attorneys from the Department of Assigned Counsel, Gaurav Sharma and Jared Varo, told The News Tribune they believed prosecutors lacked evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
“There was a lot of pieces of the picture that were missing,” Sharma said Monday.
Varo said jurors understood the difference between whether something might have happened and whether it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt. He said reasonable doubt isn’t about finding someone to hold responsible.
“It’s about whether or not this case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and whether or not you do, in fact, have an abiding belief in the guilt of the person who’s been put before you,” Varo said.
Varo said the location where the shooting occurred wasn’t secure, so the possibility that someone else left from some other direction could never be excluded. He added that video cameras — some of which were described in court records as motion activated — were not properly activating.
Jurors deliberated for about two hours over the course of two days before reaching their decision, according to court records. The verdict capped off a two-week trial that began with opening statements Oct. 31 and included 24 witnesses for the state and one defense witness, Dave LaTourette, a private investigator for the defense team.
A spokesperson for the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Adam Faber, said Monday that prosecutors spoke with the jury after the verdict was read. He said jurors seemed to find it significant that the shooting occurred a block from a busy street and that it was not captured on video. Faber added that the victim’s family was greatly disappointed.
Relatives of the victim previously told The News Tribune that Hughes was a father to nine children who grew up in the Tacoma area and attended Stadium High School. He worked as a carpenter and was described as a caring father who enjoyed sports, fishing and cooking at barbecues.
A relative of Hughes who was reached by phone Monday was upset by the outcome of the trial but declined to speak further.
