Sex A Part Of Murder Case -- Suspect, Slain Teacher Had A Relationship For Years, Seattle Police Say After Arrest

A sexual relationship existed for several years between the Seattle teacher who was slain Monday and the young man accused of the murder, police sources said.

Details about the alleged relationship between Whitman Middle School teacher Neal Summers and the shooting suspect, Darrell Allen Cloud, 24, were not revealed.

The suspect's father, Bill Cloud, said his son had never indicated he had any problems with the teacher, but said he learned yesterday that his son and other young men have had problems with Summers.

"I understand there may be a lot more, but that's all I can say," he said, speaking briefly from the front door of a newly built home overlooking Lake Washington.

Relatives and acquaintances said yesterday that Summers and Cloud had known each other since the early 1980s, when Cloud was a student at what was then Whitman Junior High School and Summers was a recently arrived social-studies and special-education teacher. The Clouds also had lived for a time in the same neighborhood as Summers.

Darrell Cloud is a young man remembered with words like "trust" and "confidence" and "all-American" by those who knew him as a star athlete who led his Kirkland high-school team into the state championship football game at the Kingdome seven years ago.

Yesterday, friends and family added the words "shocked" and "unreal" after Seattle police announced they had arrested Cloud as a suspect in Summers' slaying. Cloud, who was being held in the King County Jail, has not been charged.

"Oh, is this a joke. I'm just damn near having a heart attack," said Chuck Tarbox, Cloud's football coach at Juanita High School and now coach at Eastside Catholic High.

"He was a great kid," Tarbox said.

He was also a young man, said those who knew him, who had temper problems over the years, who left the University of Washington without graduating in his senior year after he was kicked off the varsity baseball team, and who in the past year had found himself in frequent scrapes with the law for traffic violations.

Cloud was scheduled for a second trial next week in an incident in which motorists reported to police they saw him waving a gun inside his car while he was driving on Interstate 5 under the Convention Center in downtown Seattle a year ago. A first trial last fall ended in a mistrial. Witnesses at that trial said Cloud attended looking like a "skinhead," with his head shaved and wearing combat boots.

A short-lived marriage while he was attending the UW ended with his wife asking a court to restrain Cloud from approaching her, saying Cloud had made threats, shown hostile and angry behavior and had threatened suicide.

Police released little information about Cloud's arrest yesterday or what led them to him.

Police spokeswoman Vinette Tichi said police had recovered what they believed was the gun used to shoot Summers in the back as he arrived at Whitman Middle School about 6:30 a.m. Monday. Tichi said Cloud "is being very cooperative and is making statements regarding the crime."

Police had said since shortly after the slaying that it was not a random act, and that they believed Summers had been targeted by someone who knew him.

Darrell Cloud has lived for about the past 18 months in the mother-in-law apartment of a White Center home owned by his father, an independent contractor, said Tyrone Dash, who rents the main part of the house from Bill Cloud. Dash said he had known Darrell Cloud about four years and the family in general for about eight years.

Dash said Seattle homicide detectives came to the house looking for Darrell Cloud Monday night.

"It's my understanding that Darrell and the victim had known each other a long time," he said.

"I was told the victim abused Darrell in his youth."

The 1982-'83 "Whitman Wildcat" yearbook pictured both Summers and Cloud, then an eighth-grader.

Summers, who was 45 when he was killed, remained at Whitman for the rest of his career. He became known as a dedicated teacher who acted as father figure and role model for a generation of students he took to sporting events, invited to his home and chaperoned on field trips. Many said he remained interested and in touch with them after they left Whitman, and he often went to high-school games involving former students.

Cloud went from Whitman to Seattle's Ingraham High School and became known both as a heady athlete and, at times, a volatile personality, former classmates remembered yesterday.

One classmate said Cloud once drove around the high-school neighborhood and knocked over seven stop signs. At Ingraham he quarterbacked the varsity football team and played junior-varsity basketball and varsity baseball.

But in his junior year, Cloud was suspended after losing his temper during a JV basketball game at Blanchet High and punching his fist through the front door of the school.

By the fall of 1986 the family moved to Kirkland and Cloud became a senior at Juanita High.

With Cloud at quarterback, Juanitas's football team advanced through the state playoffs to the championship game in the Kingdome, losing 14-7 to Gonzaga of Spokane in December 1986.

"I'm still in shock," his Juanita coach, Tarbox, said last night. "It's totally out of character.

"He had my total trust," Tarbox said. "If I had to sum in one word, it was confidence. The kid was total confidence. It was a relationship of mutual respect. I stayed in touch with him. The last time I heard from him was a year ago. I heard of anger-management problems at Ingraham, tearing up a jersey, but I saw none of that."

Cloud's football and baseball coach at Ingraham was Ron Sidenquist, now head football coach at Lake Washington High School in Kirkland. His reaction last night was shock: "I can't believe it."

He also recalled displays of temper by Cloud.

"He was kind of a volatile kid and in the second to last game of his junior year he was playing quarterback for Ingraham and lost a close game to Blanchet, 8-6. Darrell left the field flipping off the Blanchet crowd. And I benched him and started someone else the next game."

Sidenquist had been a teaching colleague of Neal Summers in the Seattle district, at Jane Addams Junior High until it closed and Summers moved to Whitman in 1979.

"Neal kept close tabs on his kids," he said. "He went to their sporting events when they went on to Ballard or Nathan Hale or Ingraham. He had a lot of contact with kids, like I do.

"Neal taught at-risk kids and kind of took those kids under his wing. You get close to those kids and you stay with them later on," he said.

After Cloud graduated from Juanita, he enrolled at Washington State University in the fall of 1987, turned out for football and was listed on WSU's spring roster the next spring, at 6-foot-1, 195 pounds and playing quarterback. He left WSU after one year, however.

In the fall of 1988 he enrolled at Green River Community College in Auburn and played two years as an all-conference first baseman. In 1989 he hit 17 home runs, a league record that still stands, said former Green River coach Ray Walker. He later was the league's most-valuable player in baseball.

"Darrell one of those kids you needed to sit on, and he was one of the prize guys," Walker said. "I didn't want to take a chance with him. He had so much talent."

"I thought he had a chance of being drafted (for professional baseball), with the power and strength he had."

"I'm shocked about this," Walker said last night. "If he killed anybody, I'd be the first to be absolutely shocked."

Cloud's performances won the attention of the University of Washington varsity baseball coach Bob MacDonald, who recruited him for the Huskies.

On the varsity baseball team in his junior year, Cloud "never was a problem," other than being "a little bit stubborn," said MacDonald, now baseball coach at the U.S. Naval Academy.

But in spring 1992, MacDonald said, he kicked Cloud and another player off the UW team for violating the team curfew - his second violation - while the team was in a tournament in Chico, Calif. Cloud's father had driven down for the baseball tournament and took his son home, the coach said.

Spring 1992 was also when Cloud's year-old marriage broke up. He and his former wife, Jennifer Lyn, who also asked that her current full name not be used, was a classmate of Cloud at Ingraham High. They married in April 1991 in Edmonds. She filed for divorce in April 1992, petitioning the court for a restraining order to keep Cloud from approaching her or her residence.

Jennifer's father, who asked that his name not be used, said last night that Cloud was "a nice kid" who "just kind of did a turnabout" after they married.

"He threatened her with a baseball bat and gun," said the former father-in-law. "Her mother and I both encouraged her to end the relationship."

Jennifer declined to talk about the marriage last night. "There are some things I want to put in my past," she said.

In the next year or so, District Court records show, Cloud was cited by police a number of times for speeding, driving without a valid license and negligent driving.

The most serious citation came in February last year.

A couple in a car on Interstate 5 wrote down the license number of a car whose driver was behaving erratically. They reported to the State Patrol afterward that the driver, alone in the car, was bouncing up and down in his seat, seemingly in time to music, while he pointed a gun towards the passenger side window, towards the driver's window, even backward.

Based on their report, Cloud was charged in District Court with "displaying a weapon to intimidate."

A jury found him guilty last September, but he was granted a new trial after Cloud's attorney successfully argued that there was jury misconduct, according to court records.

Although Cloud was scheduled to return to court, his brother, Travis, 20, said last night that there had been no indication of problems for Darrell when both had dinner at their parents' home in Kirkland a few nights ago.

Travis Cloud said he did not know the slain teacher and had no idea what relationship his brother might have had with him.

Tyrone Dash, the man who rents the White Center house from Cloud's father, said he understood that Cloud and Summers had known each other a long time and they had planned to have dinner together a couple of days ago.

"His family are very fine people," Dash said of the Clouds. "My heart goes out to the victim's family, but I don't know them."

--------------------------- HOW THE SHOOTING TOOK PLACE ---------------------------

-- Summers, as is his custom, arrived at Whitman Middle School early Monday, about 6:20 a.m. He parked his car east of the school in the lot between the school entrance and 15th Avenue Northwest.

-- Just as he was entering the school, Summers was shot in the back. The report from the weapon was so loud several others in the building believed there had been some sort of crash or explosion.

-- Anne Temple, a teacher, ran into the hallway and found Summers lying among strewn papers and books. Summers asked her, "I heard an explosion, what was it?"

-- Another teacher, Larry Temple, Anne's husband, came out of his classroom, saw his wife with Summers, then telephoned 911.

-- Police located a bullet fragment near where a bullet had penetrated a window.

-- Seattle Fire Department medic crew arrived, treated Summers and transported him to Harborview Medical Center, where he died at 7:23 a.m.

-- Students arriving at school were ushered into an auditorium, where they first were told that a staff member had been shot. Later, they were told it was Summers; a short time later, Principal Bi Hoa Caldwell announced that Summers was dead.

-- Homicide detectives were left without much to go on. The assailant apparently fled without being seen. But as in most homicides, investigators realized the answer would lie somewhere in Summers' background. They began interviewing Summers' friends and relatives.

-- Some time later, because the police had appealed for the public's help, detectives got a crucial telephone tip that led them to the 24-year-old suspect. He was taken into custody about 11:30 a.m. yesterday.

-- Police then recovered a weapon at a location separate from the suspect's residence.

-- The suspect was taken to the Public Safety Building downtown and later booked into the King County Jail on suspicion of homicide.