Seattle police have fatally shot Maurice Clemmons, a suspect in the slayings of four police officers, a Seattle police official said Tuesday.
According to MSNBC, Clemmons had received help since the Sunday morning shooting from a network of friends and family who gave him places to stay, medical aid, rides and money, police said.
Officers detained a sister of Clemmons who they think treated the 37-year-old suspect’s gunshot wound. “We believe she drove him up to Seattle and bandaged him up,” Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said.
Troyer told the Tacoma News-Tribune that Clemmons indicated the night before the shooting “that he was going to shoot police and watch the news.”
MSNBC stated the following:
Authorities said the gunman singled out the Lakewood officers and spared employees and other customers at the coffee shop in Parkland, a Tacoma suburb about 35 miles south of Seattle. He then fled, but not before he was apparently shot in the torso by one of the dying officers.
Killed were Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39, and Officers Ronald Owens, 37, Tina Griswold, 40, and Greg Richards, 42
Police said they aren’t sure what prompted Clemmons to shoot the officers as they did paperwork on their laptops.
Clemmons was described as increasingly erratic in the past few months and had been arrested earlier this year on charges that he punched a sheriff’s deputy in the face.
Much attention has been directed to former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who commuted Clemmons’ 108-year prison sentence in 2000.
“This guy should have never been on the street,” said Brian D. Wurts, president of the police union in Lakewood. “Our elected officials need to find out why these people are out.”
MSNBC reported that Clemmons was charged in Washington state earlier this year with assaulting a police officer and raping a child, and investigators in the sex case said he was motivated by visions that he was Jesus Christ and that the world was on the verge of the apocalypse.
But he was released from jail after posting bail.
