Gunman Killed In Shoreline After Standoff -- Gunman Killed In Shoreline After Standoff Sniper Ends Trail Of Death, Injury

Police today are trying to trace the motivation behind a day-long rampage that left a trail of victims from Brier to Shoreline, and ended only when a police sniper killed the suspected assailant after a six-hour standoff in a residential neighborhood.

The dead suspect, who police would only say was in his early 20s, is thought to have killed his mother and young nephew in Brier early yesterday, then fled south in his mother's car down Interstate 5.

He crashed into a motorcyclist in Shoreline, severing part of the rider's leg. Then he dashed on foot into a nearby neighborhood, where he beat one woman to death, left another woman beaten with a broken neck and injured three police officers before barricading himself in a house filled with guns and ammunition.

After evacuating the neighborhood and closing schools and roads, the police surrounded the house for several hours to ensure the suspect was alone.

They then felled him by one shot with a .308-caliber rifle, police said.

"I don't know where the sniper bullet ended up, but when I gave the order to make that officer take that shot, that is a shot that is supposed to take this person's life," King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said last night. "It was a tough decision to make, but in this case it was the right thing to do. I think we saved some lives by making that decision."

Police declined to formally identify the dead assailant late last night, nor would they confirm the names of the dead.

But Brier Police Chief Gary Minor said the suspect was the son of the woman killed in Brier, and was the uncle of the boy, about 2, found dead with her. The assailant was described as a community-college student with some past brushes with the law.

"We have no clue as to what set this off," said Minor. "We don't know why it happened. We just know that it did."

Minor said he thinks the killings in the Brier home were the "first step" in the day's train of horror, and characterized the man killed by police as a "leading suspect" in the entire crime spree.

Police still were trying last night to piece together the series of events, which trapped scores of people in the neighborhood and a nearby school, closed Interstate 5 at the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend and captivated television viewers throughout the region.

Officers who responded to the I-5 crash described an escalating drama in which they initially sought a hit-and-run driver, only to come under fire as they pursued him over a freeway barricade into the Shoreline neighborhood.

By then, two women in their 60s had been attacked.

Erma Ruth Spence, 63, was beaten to death as she gardened at her home in the 19000 block of Seventh Ave. N.E., said Gerald Gehret, a neighbor who said he knew Spence for more than 30 years.

Spence was a nurse, Gehret said. She was divorced and had three grown daughters and several grandchildren.

Witnesses said the assailant then man moved down the street, where Irene Z. Hilton, 82, was gardening in her yard next door to Gehret's.

Gehret said he heard Hilton, a widow whom said he has known for 35 years, cry out his first name. He peeked over the fence where he saw a young man clutch Hilton by her hair.

"She screamed and he hit her," said Gehret, a 64-year-old retired Boeing engineer.

Hilton was in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle last night with a broken neck.

The assailant then took refuge in a nearby house, where he found a cache of weapons and fired more than three dozens shots over several hours before being killed by the sheriff's sniper.

The incident began about 1:30 p.m., when the assailant slammed his car into a motorcycle on I-5 just north of Northeast 195th Street.

The cyclist, Anthony Venegas, 64, of Everett, lost his left leg below the knee, said Larry Zalin, a Harborview spokesman. Venegas was in critical condition last night.

After the crash, the driver ran west from the scene, leaped a wall and fled into a neighborhood west of the freeway, where he attacked the two women, possibly with a garden tool.

At 1:40 p.m., a 911 caller reported that a woman was screaming in the neighborhood, said King County sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart.

The assailant also entered another house - it wasn't clear when - and confronted two men, who persuaded him to leave.

John Berger, one of the men, said the assailant came in their house and sat down on the couch.

"He just kept on repeating, `I've lost my way,' " Berger said. He said his roommate got a baseball bat, and the two of them forced the man out of the house. Berger described the assailant as "wild-eyed."

Then, as law-enforcement personnel poured into the neighborhood, the man opened fire on them.

He escaped into another house, within a block of Berger's home, which was unoccupied. He fired shots that shattered a window on the patrol car of King County Sheriff's Deputy Diana Russell, 45.

Russell was hit by flying glass and suffered a skull fracture, possibly when a bullet ricocheted inside the car and grazed her head, Reichert said.

While the gunfire continued, Russell was trapped in her car, her condition unknown, for almost an hour before another police car could pull alongside and drag her to safety. She was taken to Harborview, where she was in serious condition last night.

The gunman made his last stand from a house that happened to contain a small weapons arsenal. The assailant, who apparently had one gun with him before entering the house, began using a rifle found in the house, Urquhart said.

Fred Westphal, 41, owner of the house in the 19000 block of 7th Avenue Northeast, said he was a former deerhunter and dabbled in gun collecting. He said there were seven guns in the house: a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun, two World War I vintage rifles inherited from his grandfather, one 20-gauge single-shot shotguns, one 12-gauge shotgun and two "collector type guns," which he declined to identify other than to say they were semiautomatic machine pistols.

Westphal also said there were about 100 rounds of ammunition in the house.

Police cordoned off a six-square-block area, evacuated residents and closed I-5 from Northeast 145th Street to Northeast 205th Street.

At about 6 p.m., tear gas was fired into the house at intervals and officers began shouting with bullhorns at the gunman, shouting, "Come out with your hands over your head," and "Things will only get worse."

While officers were shouting, several shots were fired from the house. The man never responded to attempts to communicate with him, Reichert said.

His body was found about 8:15 p.m., after a robot was sent into the house. The man was shot sometime before that, apparently about the time tear gas was fired.

State Trooper Philip Davidson, a two-year veteran who responded to the I-5 crash, said he came upon a car - possibly a Honda Accord - that had been torn in half.

The motorcycle was in the passenger compartment, while the car's other half was 50 feet down the road, Davidson said.

With other officers, Davidson said, he went on foot into the neighborhood and came across the man with a gun.

"I saw him with a handgun," Davidson said. "I was about 25 feet north of him when we started taking rounds."

Initially, five or six officers took cover behind one car and then split up, he said.

Scott Smith, a Mountlake Terrace police commander who was among the officers who responded to the crash and began looking for the assailant on foot, said that at the corner of Northeast 195th Street and Seventh Avenue Northeast, they saw fire crews working on a woman who was lying on the southeast corner of that intersection.

Medics were performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on her, he said.

Police then proceeded south on Seventh Avenue Northeast doing a search when they came across another woman in a back yard, who also had suffered head injuries.

That woman was "in and out of consciousness and incoherent," said Smith, speaking in the parking lot at the Shoreline Senior Center.

"We did what we could for her and then proceeded south of that location," Smith said, his voice choked with emotion. "Then we started taking rounds. We hunkered down.

"(The gunshots) were slow at first, deliberate, just one or two. And then a few minutes later, we started taking more. To me it sounded like an automatic weapon. We were all piled in behind this car, and (bullets) were coming in everywhere - over and over and over again. We were pinned down, we couldn't go anywhere."

At one point, Smith bowed his head in prayer with another officer.

"You'd pray too. I almost died today," said Smith, who suffered cuts on one arm from flying glass.

Kevin Clay, another Mountlake officer, who had blood trickling down his right elbow, also from flying glass, said, "I was pinned down for an hour behind my vehicle."

High-speed drive down I-5

State Trooper Tom Foster said the assailant drove down I-5 at high speed before the crash, abruptly moving from the far left lane to the far right lane and clipping the motorcycle.

"We are fortunate there weren't a lot more injuries," Foster said.

A 25-year-old female resident of the Shoreline neighborhood, , who asked not to be identified, said she was inside her house when she heard screaming from a nearby home.

She said she went outside to investigate and saw a man jump over a fence and run across the street.

She described the man as having corn-rowed hair and wearing dark clothing.

"He looked freaked out," she said.

There were sirens coming from the freeway.

As the man passed her, she said she asked him, "What the hell is going on?"

He motioned toward the freeway and ran across the street to another house, she said.

The woman returned to her own home and called 911. She said a 911 call played on TV news was hers.

She said she later learned that two women were beaten in the house where the screams came from. She said she also learned that the man had fired at police officers, but she said the man did not have a gun visible when she saw him.

The suspect eventually holed up in a house a half-block from the woman's house.

Westphal was on his way home from work when he was turned away by police. He went to a friend's house, where he saw his house under seige on television. He called 911 to inform authorities it was his house, and was ordered to the situation command center to provide a layout of the house.

After the gunman was killed, police reopened the northbound lanes of I-5, seven hours after the incident began.

Seattle Times staff reporters Mike Carter, Alex Fryer, Ian Ith, Diane Brooks, Barb Serrano, Keiko Morris and Alex Tizon contributed to this report.