Bellevue man fatally shot by police reportedly charged officer with a knife

A 61-year-old Bellevue man, who was fatally shot Tuesday night after reportedly charging an officer with a knife, is the fifth Seattle-area man to be shot by police since July 1.

The man, identified as John Pebles, was killed outside a Bellevue strip mall as officers tried to detain him following a disturbance call at the apartment building where Pebles lived with his wife, said Bellevue police spokeswoman Officer Carla Iafrate.

Pebles' wife, Mary Kay Pebles, told KIRO-TV and KOMO-TV that she had locked her husband out of their apartment Tuesday and that he tried to break a window with a planter. Mary Kay Pebles said she and her husband were separating after eight years of marriage because of his temper.

At 3 a.m. Tuesday, the couple had argued inside their apartment and Pebles had threatened to kill his wife, Iafrate said. The wife reported the incident to Bellevue police around 10 p.m. Tuesday, telling an officer her husband had a long history of domestic violence that she hadn't previously reported, Iafrate said.

The wife and two male guests were told not to let the husband back into the apartment, Iafrate said.

Then, just after 11 p.m. Tuesday, police were called to the couple's apartment building in the 12200 block of Northeast Eighth Street.

A resident called 911, reporting "a man yelling and threatening and pounding on a door at the apartment," Iafrate said.

As police were heading to the scene, Pebles walked west from the apartment building along Northeast Eighth Street, followed by the two male guests who encouraged him to wait for police to arrive, she said. Pebles refused and the two men saw him making slashing motions across his body, Iafrate said. It wasn't clear whether he was cutting himself.

An officer found Pebles walking near a strip mall, just east of a gas station at Northeast Eighth Street and 120th Avenue Northeast, Iafrate said. Pebles began to flee and ignored the officer's commands that he stop, Iafrate said. Pebles then turned around and came at the officer with a knife, again ignoring the officer's commands, she said.

"The officer was trying to detain him," Iafrate said. "That's when the suspect charged the officer with a knife in his hand, and the officer shot and killed him."

Helen Cho was with her daughter inside a nearby convenience store when shots rang out. Cho "heard four or five gunshots," the noise so loud it was as if "it was right in my ear," she said. She saw a man lying on the ground and then watched police officers descend on the area, "coming from everywhere," she said.

"I didn't think he was dead, just wounded in the arm or leg," Cho said. "But 15 minutes passed, 30 minutes passed, and he was still laying there."

The men who witnessed the shooting told detectives they saw Pebles try to attack the officer with a knife, said Iafrate, the police spokeswoman. The officer, a six-year department veteran, is on routine paid administrative leave.

Pebles was killed three days after a King County sheriff's deputy fatally shot 59-year-old James L. Slater Jr. after Slater's wife called 911 on Saturday during a domestic-violence dispute at their Woodinville home.

The three other men shot by area police this month survived, including two men — a suspected bank robber on July 1 and a man who allegedly tried to run over an officer with his car on Monday — who were wounded by Seattle police.

The third man, who is from Arlington, was wounded Friday by Snohomish County sheriff's deputies responding to a domestic-violence call.

"I don't think there's any rhyme or reason to it — sometimes it just happens in groupings like that," Iafrate said of the recent spate of police shootings.

Sgt. John Urquhart, a spokesman for the King County Sheriff's Office, agreed.

"There's no particular inference you can make from the fact we've had a run of them," Urquhart said.

He also didn't know what to make of the fact that both Pebles and Slater were middle-aged men, since anecdotally those involved in officer-involved shootings tend to be younger people.

"Who knows? Again, it's just one of those things," Urquhart said.

"The more bizarre the scenario, the more we struggle for a reason," he added. "But oftentimes, there isn't a reason. Nothing we can understand, anyway."

Laurence Miller, a police psychologist in Boca Raton, Fla., said a rash of police shootings — like the one seen locally — "sometimes really is just a matter of coincidence."

Shooting a suspect "really is a last-resort kind of thing," and is something no officer wants to do, Miller said. "Police are trained to give a suspect every chance to surrender."

But if a suspect refuses and puts the officer or someone else in imminent danger, "the mandate is to take them down," he said.

There are two types of people typically involved in police shootings: The first type, like the alleged bank robber who was shot in the hand as he attempted to elude police in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood on July 1, finds himself "overwhelmed by an overwhelming force and tries to bluster his way out of it," Miller said.

The second type are people, usually men, who are already emotionally and mentally unstable but are able "to cope and keep it together" until some crisis hits, Miller said. Then, "a toxic combination of depression, hostility and paranoia" result in a violent outburst, he said.

Domestic-violence situations are especially volatile since "by the time the police arrive, one or more people are already in an ... emotionally distraught state," Miller said. "Nothing makes people crazier than our loved ones."

Add alcohol or drugs into the mix and it's "like grease on the skids of impulsive behavior," he said. "All alcohol and drugs do is make it more likely you'll go in the direction you're already predisposed to."

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

Lewis Kamb: 206-464-2341 or lkamb@seattletimes.com

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.

Information in this article, originally published July 9, 2009, was corrected July 10, 2009. In a previous version of this story, Bellevue Police Department spokeswoman Carla Iafrate's surname was misspelled as Iafrata.