Suspect in mall shooting arrested in Portland

Police in Portland today arrested the 21-year-old man suspected of fatally shooting a 16-year-old boy and wounding a second teen Saturday at the Westfield Southcenter mall, Tukwila police said.

Tukwila police spokesman Mike Murphy said detectives are on their way to Portland to interview the suspect, Barry Lee Saunders.

Sources say Saunders was arrested at a Portland motel after police responded to some sort of a disturbance. It wasn't immediately clear whether Saunders was directly involved in the disturbance.

Murphy said Saunders didn't turn himself in, but was arrested after Portland police responded to an unrelated call. He did not give additional details, but said it was a call related to a non-violent incident that led police to Saunders.

"We were on a call and encountered him by coincidence," said Sgt. Brian Schmautz of the Portland Police Bureau. "It was a series of circumstances that led us to him."

Portland officers arrested Saunders when they found out he was wanted on a warrant issued out of King County.

Schmautz said Saunders will be arraigned Friday in Portland. At that time, Saunders will likely indicate whether he plans to waive extradition or fight his return to King County to face charges of second-degree murder and first-degree assault.

Schmautz declined to comment further on the arrest, referring a reporter to Tukwila police. Murphy said during a news conference this afternoon that police do not know how long he had been in Portland.

According to charging papers, the victim, Diaquan Jones, and three friends began throwing gang signs at two rivals during an encounter at the Tukwila mall. A fistfight ensued, and Saunders pulled a gun and fatally shot Jones in the stomach and wounded 15-year-old Jermaine McGowan, according to charging papers.

Saunders escaped in the chaos that followed the shooting as shoppers ran for cover.

McGowan was in satisfactory condition Tuesday at Harborview Medical Center.

Tukwila police said Saunders targeted Jones and McGowan, who were among the four boys fighting with Saunders' brother and one of their friends at the mall.

Murphy on Tuesday declined to discuss the ongoing investigation or say whether the shootings were gang-related. However, Murphy did say there has been an escalation in violence around the region in recent days that may be retaliatory.

Saunders' former stepmother, Crystal Saunders, said this morning that Saunders had been raised by a single mother in the Seattle area. He was the oldest boy in a family with several siblings, said Crystal Saunders, who lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

She said Saunders did not meet his father until he was in his late teens during a visit to Washington, D.C.

She described her former stepson as "very nice" and "very polite."

She said she didn't know what to think about the criminal charges the young man is now facing.

Seattle police have been loath to label as gang-related any of the shootings that have left six teenagers dead since January, although the department's gang unit has been involved in all the investigations. However, patrol officers, prosecutors and probation officers say teens they encounter tell them the rivalry is alive and well — and heating up.

Law-enforcement officials said Jones, McGowan and two other teens shot in a separate shooting Sunday night outside a Rainier Valley convenience store had ties to a Rainier Valley or South End gang.

Murphy would not say whether Saunders is connected with a rival gang.

For police and prosecutors, the mall shootings underscore how quickly fights can escalate into gunfire, an incident made even more disturbing because it happened in a crowded mall.

"Where are they getting the guns?" asked a former Seattle gang-unit officer, who asked to not be named. "They're everywhere."

Assistant United States Attorney Vince Lombardi, an anti-gang coordinator, said the gun violence is frustrating to federal investigators.

"Kids in gangs is not a new thing," Lombardi said. "Juveniles committing crime is not a new thing. What surprises me is how heavily armed they are in Seattle and how quick they are to go for a gun."

Wyman Yip, King County senior deputy prosecutor overseeing the juvenile division, could not characterize the increase in juvenile violence he sees as being gang-related, but agreed it's going up.

"There's definitely been an escalation," Yip said. "There's no doubt about it."

Police in Seattle and Tukwila are also investigating whether two other shootings involving young people in Seattle — one early Sunday at Vito's Madison Grill on First Hill and another shooting six hours earlier in the 8600 block of Rainier Avenue South — may be related to the Southcenter shooting.

On Wednesday, the King County Medical Examiner's Office identified 22-year-old Nathaniel Lee Thomas as the victim in the shooting at Vito's. He died from a gunshot wound to the head. A police spokesman said he didn't have any new information about the case. Adescription of the gunman has not been made public.

According to one girl, Jones was a friend of two other young men who were also shot over the weekend in the separate shooting on Sunday on Rainier Valley South.

A teenage girl said in a phone interview earlier this week that she was hanging out with Jones the day before Jones was killed, when he reportedly said, "Real Gs don't make it past 17." He was referring to "real gangsters," the girl said.

On Sunday, Terrance Paige, 17, was shot in the leg and 16-year-old Thomas Williams was shot in the forearm outside a Rainier Valley convenience store.

"I don't know if it's related, but all three of them were friends," the girl said of Jones, Paige and Williams.

As the girl spoke with a reporter, a chorus of voices could be heard in the background telling the girl "not to be a snitch." She hung up. Contacted later, the girl declined to provide any additional information.

Paige and Williams told police they did not see the person who shot them, Yip said.

Another person who did not see who shot him was the 16-year-old boy who survived a shooting behind Garfield High School on Halloween that left 15-year-old Quincy Coleman dead.

But friends of Coleman's claimed at the time that he was killed by a Rainier Valley gang member and vowed retaliation.

According to police and prosecutors, the code of silence — which warns gang members and witnesses alike not to "snitch" to police — is severely undermining their investigation into the murder.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said Tuesday that youth violence is at the worst level he has seen in nearly 20 years. He said that prosecutors in his office's Most Dangerous Offender Project have been running from shooting to shooting, in many cases where kids in their early teens are the victim or the suspect.

"It's disturbing to see 15-, 16-year-old kids shooting each other for reasons only known to them. Their lack of cooperation with police is another very disturbing trend."

Satterberg said that when he prosecuted gang crimes in the late 1980s, victims and witnesses wouldn't hesitate to talk to police and testify in court. But nowadays prosecutors are struggling to get anyone to talk about what they saw, what Satterberg refers to as a "don't-snitch code."

"Now the trend has gone toward if the person has been shot, they aren't willing to disclose that to police," he said. "If we don't have witnesses, we don't have a case. That is the emerging code of the street; we don't know how deep that runs.

"It's very disturbing to see kids killing kids and to see the ethic on the street being promoted as protecting the kids who are perpetrating the violence."

Satterberg said he has started working with the Seattle City Council and community members in the Central Area, especially since the attack on Ed McMichael, known as "Tuba Man."

McMichael was jumped by a group of teens near Seattle Center on Oct. 25 and died nine days later from his injuries. He said the group hopes to somehow get a message to children. He adds, "there isn't an easy solution."

"People need to step forward when they know [about crime]," Satterberg said. "They have to cooperate with authorities as an act of civil duty, of courage and valor."

He said authorities need to go into the schools and start with children as young as the first grade and "encourage kids to speak up because it's their community in the long run.

"This is their community they are going to live in, do they want to tolerate murder?"

Seattle Police Department spokesman Sean Whitcomb declined to comment on the ongoing investigations into the recent shootings. He did say that despite the recent slayings, statistics show that violent crime is not on the increase in the city.

A Seattle police commander, speaking on condition of anonymity, said street officers have been warning for some time that gang violence was escalating, but department officials have focused only on statistics.

"We knew it was coming a number of years ago," the commander said.

Top department officials haven't wanted to recognize the problem because it "doesn't look good," the commander said.

But the "entire feel on the street" is that violence among gang members has escalated, along with more violence directed at officers, the commander said.

After Coleman's shooting, Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess called on the city to "acknowledge — publicly, out loud — that we have a serious gang crisis in our city."

Christine Clarridge: cclarridge@seattletimes.com or 206-464-8983

Sara Jean Green: sgreen@seattletimes.com or 206-515-5654

Seattle Times staff reporters Jennifer Sullivan, Steve Miletich, Nick Perry and Jennifer Sullivan and news researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.