Ex-Pierce County jailer gets 3 weekends in jail for drunkenly backing over woman
The former probationary corrections officer for the Pierce County Jail who was fired after he was arrested in downtown Tacoma has admitted to drunkenly backing over his ex-girlfriend’s head and was sentenced to 10 days in jail.
Cameron David James Boucher, 23, pleaded guilty May 15 to vehicular assault DUI, driving recklessly and with disregard for the safety of others.
Pierce County Superior Court Judge Timothy Ashcraft sentenced Boucher the same day, giving him an exceptional sentence below the standard range, which was three to nine months in jail. Prosecutors and the defense had recommended no more jail time — Boucher served two days when he was arrested in January 2025 — on the basis that the victim was an initiator or willing participant of the incident.
Boucher will spend the next three weekends in jail starting May 22, according to sentencing documents. Ashcraft ordered Boucher to undergo a substance-use disorder evaluation, complete any treatment and not have any contact with his ex-girlfriend for 10 years.
Boucher’s blood-alcohol content was 0.018 within two hours of the incident, according to sentencing documents. The legal limit for drivers in Washington is 0.08. He had no prior criminal convictions.
A defense attorney for Boucher did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
According to a police report included in the probable cause document, Boucher and his ex-girlfriend on New Year’s Eve were drinking at a bar near 11th Street and Broadway. A witness told a Tacoma Police Department officer that he went with the victim to her car to wait for a designated driver when the victim saw Boucher nearby and went to speak with him.
Boucher was in the driver’s seat of his Toyota Tacoma when the woman suddenly slumped over, according to the police report. She collapsed, and a witness said the pickup’s engine started, and Boucher turned the steering wheel, backed up and struck the woman’s head.
The witness yelled and punched the vehicle’s window to try to intervene, then pulled the victim away. According to the police report, a physical altercation ensued between Boucher and the witness. Two people reportedly held him down until the police arrived around 2 a.m.
In a victim-impact statement filed in court, the woman wrote that she didn’t remember the moment of the incident because she had been drugged. She said she remembered counting down to midnight and then woke up in the hospital in excruciating pain.
“My scalp had been dragged across concrete,” the woman wrote. “My left ear was torn up. Bruises covered my legs. A deep laceration on the right side of my head required 9 staples. I couldn’t work for over a month.”
The woman said she lost feeling on the right side of her head, and her hair has barely grown back. She asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence allowed. She said she was serving a lifetime of pain, fear, physical insecurity, financial instability and emotional distress.
“He wasn’t just some guy out partying,” the victim wrote. “He was a law enforcement officer in training. A corrections deputy. He knew the law. He knew what DUI meant. And he broke that law anyway. He chose to gamble with someone else’s life. My life.”
The arrest of Boucher set off an internal investigation of the Pierce County Jail’s hiring practices between 2023 and 2025. Officials reviewed how Boucher was hired and later found concerns that prompted a wider hiring audit.
Boucher was initially disqualified from employment because he had a suspended driver’s license from Rhode Island and a history of driving infractions, according to a review of the internal investigation by the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. The review showed the fact that Boucher had a relative at another law enforcement agency got his file another look, and his disqualification was overturned.
The subsequent wider audit of hiring found that in two years, more than a third of the people hired to work in the Corrections Bureau either should have been disqualified from employment or later lost their jobs. Clark County’s review of the internal investigation determined that officials made questionable hiring decisions in the midst of a staffing crisis — including hiring people who had admitted to domestic violence — but it found no policy violations by officials making the hiring decisions.
