A Spokane County sheriff’s deputy died on Wednesday after being shot during an ambush on a domestic violence call in Washington state. Another deputy remains on life support and is not expected to survive after the attack that turned a rescue response into a deadly scene.
The deputy who died was one of two officers hit when a gunman opened fire as SWAT officers and deputies approached a home on Tuesday. He is survived by his wife and two children, a detail that gives the loss a family shape even as the official toll kept rising.
John Nowels said SWAT team members and deputies approached the house, tried to breach the door and were met with gunfire. Deputies returned fire and pulled the two wounded deputies to safety, then rushed them to a hospital along with the woman whose report brought them to the scene in the first place.
That call began when a woman ran to a neighbor’s house saying her brother had shot her. Responding deputies learned the suspect had an active felony arrest warrant and access to two guns, which is why SWAT was brought in. The woman’s injuries were not life-threatening.
The part that did not fit the first call came later. Investigators found one person dead inside the home, another body in the yard and the suspect dead on the property. The sheriff’s office has not identified the three dead people, but the sequence makes clear how quickly a domestic violence report became a multiple-fatality confrontation.
The sheriff’s office said its deputies moved toward danger to protect people they did not know, and the words now land against the result: one deputy dead, another unlikely to survive, and three more deaths at the property. What remains unanswered is who exactly died at the home and in the yard, and what happened inside before the shooting broke open.
