Police beat: Defending Mom at gunpoint, a squatter with nerve and no-contact no-nos

Editors note: Compiled from reports to Tacoma police and the Pierce County Sheriffs Department.

June 21: It might be a fine thing to defend Mom’s honor — but not with a pellet gun.

The trouble started at a graduation party on June 18. Sheriff’s deputies responded to a reported assault at an address in the 11600 block of 248th Street Court East. A 17-year-old girl said her one-time boyfriend peppered her with pellets after an argument.

The girl said she had dated the boy in the eighth grade. He invited her to his graduation party. But the girl and the boy’s mother had argued a few months earlier, and the fight dissolved into name-calling and hair-pulling.

Then why go to the boy’s graduation party?

The girl said she assumed Mom wouldn’t be there.

She was wrong. At the party, Mom had confronted the girl again, called her names and walked her off the property. The girl responded in kind, she said, calling the mother a name. The girl and a friend walked away, she said.

A few moments later, the girl said, the boy drove up and confronted her, asking if she had really called his mother that name.

“Yeah,” the girl said.

“Are you really that trashy?” the boy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are you really that low?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

At that point, the boy pulled the pellet gun and started firing from two feet away, the girl said. The girl’s friend backed up the story, saying she yelled at the boy to stop, and took a couple of shots to her hand and wrist.

Deputies tracked the boy down by his license plate a few days later and pulled him over in another area of the county. The boy was cuffed and walked to a patrol car.

The deputy told the boy he was under arrest for shooting his ex-girlfriend with the pellet gun.

“She was never my girlfriend,” the boy said.

Hadn’t he dated her in eighth grade?

The boy said he forgot about that. The deputy booked him into the Pierce County jail on suspicion of third-degree assault.

June 21: Tacoma police often find squatters in the city’s boarded-up homes. It’s not so common to find them at Proctor Station, the spiffy new six-story complex that sparked a fight over neighborhood density last year.

A Tacoma officer responded to a dispatch report of an unwanted person in the complex. Employees had followed him to a nearby drug store.

Officers caught up with the 32-year-old man outside the store. He said he had been given keys to an apartment, after paying a deposit, and that he was waiting for paperwork. He went inside the store while officers compared notes.

Other officers checked with the manager of the complex, who said the man entered the apartment office, took a set of keys without permission, and started using a vacant unit.

Meanwhile, the man stepped out of the store, carrying boxes of electronics, bulging out of a purse.

Officers spoke to the man, told him he was being detained and read him his rights. The man said he understood.

Had he just taken the electronics from the store without paying?

“Yes,” the man said.

A records check revealed an active arrest warrant under the man’s name. Security video from the store confirmed the theft. The apartment manager asked police to ban the man from the complex.

Officers agreed and booked the man into the Pierce County Jail on the warrant and suspicion of shoplifting.

June 20: It’s possible to violate a no-contact order without getting caught. The task becomes more difficult when you run a red light in front of a cop and barely miss a pedestrian while driving with an expired license.

The Tacoma officer was on routine patrol at the intersection of A Street and Puyallup Avenue when he spotted the silver 2013 Chevrolet Cruze blow through the light as a man tried to cross.

The officer flicked on his lights and pulled the car over. He saw a man, 36, in the driver’s seat, and a woman, 32, slumped over with her head in the man’s lap. The woman moaned, and her arms flailed occasionally. Her words were unintelligible.

The man said he didn’t know why the officer pulled him over; he assumed it was because of his passenger.

The officer said the man just ran a red light and nearly hit someone. What was wrong with the woman?

Drunk, the man said. His wife had downed an entire bottle of liquor and was out of it. She had called and asked him for a ride.

The officer called for medical aid and asked the driver for identification. The man provided an expired license. He couldn’t find proof of insurance.

The license said the man needed prescription glasses to drive. He wasn’t wearing them. The man said he was blind without them. His wife had knocked them off while she was flailing around and popped out one of the lenses, he said,

Records revealed two active no-contact orders filed by the woman against the man and prior arrests for violating them. The man said he knew about that, but he thought one of the orders had been terminated. He showed the officer legal papers to prove it.

The officer couldn’t tell whether the termination applied to both orders. He told the man he was under arrest and booked him into the Pierce County Jail on suspicion of violating a no-contact order and reckless driving.

On the way to jail, the man said his two children, 13 and 8, were home alone at the woman’s house. He wanted them taken to a neighbor’s place. The officer passed the message along to county sheriff’s deputies.

This story was originally published June 25, 2016 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Police beat: Defending Mom at gunpoint, a squatter with nerve and no-contact no-nos."