Son of Tacoma utility boss sentenced to prison for fatally stabbing stepfather
The man who repeatedly stabbed his stepfather in the bathroom of a Northeast Tacoma home while suffering a severe mental health crisis, and then went to a police substation to report the homicide, has been sentenced to 20 years, four months in prison.
Gaven Lee Flowers, the son of Tacoma Public Utilities director Jackie Flowers, pleaded guilty June 12 to second-degree murder with a deadly weapon. Superior Court Judge Shelly Moss sentenced him the same day, imposing a prison term at the high end of the standard sentencing range of about 10-20 years.
Gaven Flowers, 29, had no prior criminal history. A forensic psychological evaluation filed with the court earlier this month reported that in the months before the Feb. 11, 2025 murder he had become increasingly isolated in his family’s home, was hearing voices and had become consumed by the delusion that his stepfather, Michael Spears, was poisoning his food and harming him with electromagnetic waves.
Jackie Flowers attended his sentencing hearing and addressed the court along with one of Spears’ sons and another speaker, according to court records. In a victim-impact statement filed with the court last year, Jackie Flowers said that had her son received proper and ongoing psychiatric care, “This tragedy could have been prevented.”
“Following misdiagnosis and lack of a clear treatment plan, he became unhoused, isolated, and afraid,” Jackie Flowers wrote. “Despite my advocacy and repeated requests for help, there were no effective interventions. The system failed to catch him before he fell through every safety net.”
Three days before the murder, according to the psychological assessment, Jackie Flowers contacted designated crisis responders after an attempt to take her son to lunch ahead of his Feb. 10 birthday fell apart. In interviews done over two days, Jackie Flowers told the psychologist evaluating her son that he was agitated that morning, and on the drive to town he began falsely accusing her of changing his grandmother’s will to cut him out of an inheritance.
When the crisis responders arrived at the family’s house, where Gaven Flowers had been screaming at his mother in the driveway, they found his health insurance had not been renewed. Jackie Flowers reported that her son had refused to renew it in December 2024 because he was convinced it was being used to track him. The responders advised Gaven Flowers that he needed to get his insurance in place by Monday, and that they would return Wednesday.
“So, the DCR called me on Wednesday and said they couldn’t get a hold of Gaven and wanted to know where he was, and I told them ‘he’s in jail for killing my husband,’” Jackie Flowers said, according to the assessment. “If they would have gotten him resources when we needed them, instead of telling him to get his insurance renewed and they would come back, I just wonder if things would have been different.”
The psychologist, Dr. Lezlie Pickett, gave a timeline describing the deterioration of Gaven Flowers’ mental functioning between 2019 and 2025.
He dropped out of the University of Idaho in 2019, where he studied engineering, and moved into his mother’s Tacoma home. Between 2020 and 2021, Gaven Flowers had his first “overt psychotic break” and began expressing bizarre beliefs involving electromagnetic frequencies and special sensitivities, according to the evaluation.
He was psychiatrically hospitalized and treated with antipsychotic medication. Jackie Flowers reported that her son began to improve, and he moved near Edmonds College in Lynwood. In 2022 he became insistent about not taking his medication. In 2024, according to court documents, he lived in his vehicle for six months. Eventually he moved back home.
In the following years, Gaven Flowers’ became increasingly paranoid about Spears, according to the evaluation, and he interpreted electronics, vibrations, Wi-Fi devices and household items as mechanisms of surveillance, torture or control.
The assessment noted that Gaven Flowers’ self-reports of relationships, family history and past events were “markedly inconsistent” with information provided by his mother, who described a family system characterized by warmth, shared positive experiences and a historically loving relationship between her son and Spears. Jackie Flowers told the psychologist how she would sometimes leave notes on her son’s door such as “Hey, I love you.” She said her son and Spears had no arguments before the murder and that her son rarely came out of the basement where he lived.
Gaven Flowers reported that voices, which he referred to as his “spirit squad,” began talking about killing Spears after a family trip in October 2024. He said the voices became louder and more frequent in December and January.
“The simplicity of it was just ‘When you kill Mike, you won’t have to worry about this,’” Gaven Flowers told the psychologist, according to the evaluation.
Prosecutors originally charged Gaven Flowers with first-degree murder, accusing him of killing Spears with premeditated intent. The offense was amended to second-degree murder as part of plea negotiations, according to court records.
The psychological assessment determined that to a reasonable degree of certainty, Gaven Flowers lacked the mental capacity to form premeditated intent. It diagnosed him with a schizophrenia-spectrum psychotic disorder, chronic in course, with symptoms only partially remitted with medication. It said evidence suggested his behavior leading up to the murder was “increasingly governed by psychotic threat perception and internally generated commands or cues.”
When Gaven Flowers arrived at the Northeast Tacoma police substation to report the stabbing, records state he wanted to report a homicide by self-defense, then later said he should have described it as “preemptive self-defense.” While not legally sound, the psychological assessment said that suggested the defendant understood his action through a “delusional protective framework” and not as an ordinary plan to kill.
After the murder, Jackie Flowers took an indefinite personal leave but returned to work in March 2025, according to a spokesperson for Tacoma Public Utilities. An annual performance review later described her performance as “nothing short of heroic.”
“I live with two unbearable realities,” Jackie Flowers wrote in her victim-impact statement. “Every day, I try to balance anger and grief with compassion and forgiveness. I hold space for both because I have lost not only the man that I loved deeply but also my son’s life was lost to a disease that went untreated and unrecognized for far too long. I hope this court will recognize the significant role that untreated mental illness played in this tragedy.”
