A Tragic Meeting On A Country Highway -- Two Opposite People - An Unhappy Ending

"I was Drunk and picked up 2 Hitch Hiker's and I done a stupid thing while in under the Influence of Alcohol.

I feel it was a very Stupid act on my part.

I had a few drinks. And was going home. I picked two people out gas. They got acting mouthey and hit them and made them get out of my car. And they said I tried to rob them. Signed Rick Thorp."

- Written statement of alleged gunman Ricky Ray Thorp, in court records after Thorp pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in 1984.

Nobody thought Glenn `Andy' Anderson would come to this. Just about everybody thought Ricky Ray Thorp would.

Thorp's life was filled with neighbors who walked away when they saw him coming, with police who knew him too well. Anderson had a wife who worried if he didn't get home on time, and coworkers awed by his magic touch with fiberglass.

When they met Thursday on a stretch of the Old Sumner-Buckley Highway, Anderson didn't have a chance.

Anderson's friend, Brian Stanley - on a porch a short distance away - thought they spoke.

Then quickly, the gunman swung up his rifle and fired a fatal shot point-blank at Anderson's head. Stanley tried to distract the sniper, was shot in the elbow, and watched the gunman continue on his bloody walk.

Around the same time Marcheta Braun, a critical-care nurse returning to her home next to Thorp's, was stopped by a police blockade. At first she thought, with all the medics and helicopters, that there'd been a big accident. No, somebody told her. Some guy gone crazy, shooting cars. And it made nothing but sense to her.

"I know who that is," Braun thought to herself. "Ricky went nuts. Finally."

When police finished counting, 10 people had been injured, including Anderson, who died early yesterday, and a woman cut by flying glass from a bullet.

Michael Stotts, 37, of Buckley, was in critical condition last night at Harborview Medical Center with a head wound. Richard German, 30, has been upgraded from serious to stable condition at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup with multiple wounds.

Officers said Thorp had walked from his home firing at a jogger, motorists, people working in their yards and even neighbors coming outside to investigate the sound of shooting.

Thorp, 30, who authorities say has a long criminal history, was shot in the abdomen by police when he raised his rifle at them. He was in serious but stable condition last night at St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma.

Born in Moberly, Mo., Thorp was the middle child of five. The family moved to Washington when Thorp was in 5th grade, but his father moved back to Missouri when the couple divorced in 1976.

According to court documents filed by Thorp's probation officer, his mother, Janet Thorp, was relieved. She said it took very little to provoke her husband into rage and physical abuse."

The rest of the family lived in a one-story pale yellow house in the gaping valley, with a rambling yard and horse pastures fore and aft. He quit high school in Buckley before finishing freshman year, and worked for a local dairyman for several years, but they didn't get along.

Around that time, Thorp became a habitual traffic offender, driving while his license was suspended and while intoxicated several times in 1982, according to court records.

The night of April 3, 1983, Thorp picked up two men hitchhiking on Highway 410, then stopped the car and demanded money. When one man showed him an empty wallet, Thorp hit him with a chunk of iron, then fled into some woods while being chased by police.

He pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree robbery and received a suspended sentence and probation, provided he went through alcohol education and met other conditions.

By 1987, however, Thorp had been arrested twice more for traffic offenses, including driving while intoxicated. But a probation officer recommended he be released from supervision anyway.

By neighbors' accounts and court records, Thorp did seem to calm down after that.

Yet, he would walk around the neighborhood with a menacing glare, sometimes holding a gun as he walked, and sometimes he would shoot in his backyard without a target.

Virgil Nygren, a Bonney Lake neighbor who had met Thorp at the dairy, was hopeful for him. Thorp had lived on and off with him, and Nygren was impressed with the way Thorp seemed to straighten up around Nygren's young children.

The two men frequently talked about Thorp's drug problem, Nygren said. Thorp knew it was serious. But Nygren said Thorp had vowed he would go clean last Dec. 13, on his 30th birthday.

"And he did. He turned himself around. He moved in with me, he got a mechanic's job. And he was clean," Nygren said.

That turn-around ended about two weeks ago, Nygren believes. On that day, Thorp borrowed a car from him, then drove to Centralia to see his preschool daughters and ex-girlfriend.

"He was real excited to see those girls, he really loved them," Nygren said. "But as soon as he drove up, his girlfriend just scooped up the kids, jumped in her Chevy and left them in the dust. He was just devastated. I've never seen him that upset."

Around that time, Janet Thorp told authorities, Ricky Thorp stopped sleeping and began acting "bizarre and strung out," as if he was on some kind of drugs. He had been placing blankets over the mirrors and windows in his bedroom, said Pierce County Sheriff's Lt. Pete Carder.

About 4:45 p.m. Thursday, he had words with his mother and strode out the door with his brother's .22-caliber rifle.

"I told him, `Get back here, get back here!' But he said `No' and kept on going," Janet Thorp told a 911 dispatcher shortly afterward.

"I tried to stop him, I don't know . . ."

The first person he saw, apparently, was his cousin, Richard German, said Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Curt Benson. The two had an angry exchange and Thorp fired at least four or five times. His mother then called 911.

On a tape of the 911 call played by authorities, Janet Thorp asked to go out and help someone who had been shot. The dispatcher told her to stay inside.

"I'm not afraid of him," she replied. "I'm not afraid."

Glenn "Andy" Anderson got his nickname in the Navy. Somewhere between his home port in California and Taiwan, Anderson told friends at work, his shipmates started calling him, "Andy Capp." And it stuck.

But then, lots of things stuck to Andy: Smiles, friends, and just about every skill he turned his hand to. He was working as a dishwasher in an Olympia restaurant, newly married to his wife, Kathleen, when he stumbled into working in fiberglass.

A friend vouched for him during a busy spring season six years ago at Stanley Plastics, a small Buckley company that repairs boats, and the owner hired him.

Whatever skepticism Wes Stanley had about bringing on a dishwasher evaporated when Anderson scoured libraries and building supply manuals for trade secrets.

"Within a month he was telling me stuff I didn't know about my own business. That's why it didn't take long for him to go from grunt to foreman," Stanley said.

As a foreman, Anderson was trying to recruit a new fiberglass worker Thursday afternoon. After waiting half an hour, Anderson decided to drive home.

Anderson never learned Wes Stanley had already talked to the prospective worker.