Fatima Suzanne Locke, a 58-year-old woman, died suddenly on May 14, 2026, in Puyallup, Washington. Although initial information listed her as 57, published obituary records give her date of birth as August 17, 1967, making her 58 at the time of her death. Online gun-violence records identify Locke among people fatally shot in Puyallup on that date, indicating that her death involved gunfire.
Publicly available information about the circumstances of the shooting remains unusually limited.
Searches of local news reporting, Puyallup Police Department information, Pierce County Sheriff's Office reporting, and other indexed sources did not reveal a detailed account describing where the shooting occurred, what led to it, who fired the weapon, or whether investigators determined that Locke had been specifically targeted. The publicly accessible sources located for the case also do not identify a named suspect or describe a known motive.
Locke's death came suddenly after a life that had taken her across the world. She was born in Victoria, Seychelles, on August 17, 1967, and developed an interest in travel from an early age. According to her obituary, she left Seychelles at 13, spent time in England and later moved to Mililani, Hawaii, where she completed her schooling. She went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication from the University of Hawaii.
Travel eventually became Locke's profession as well as one of the defining themes of her life. She achieved a childhood ambition of becoming an international flight attendant when Northwest Airlines hired her in February 1999. After approximately a decade with Northwest, she joined Southwest Airlines, where she was in her 17th year of employment when she died. Altogether, her obituary credited her with approximately 27 years as a flight attendant, with work assignments that included Detroit, New York, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago and Las Vegas.
Locke met Alan Kleinheinz while the two were working a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004. They remained in contact, and their friendship eventually became a relationship in 2012. The couple maintained homes in both the Seattle and Las Vegas areas. Her obituary remembered Locke for her generosity, kindness and willingness to give both her time and resources to others, while memorial messages from friends and former coworkers recalled traveling and flying with her and described the shock of learning that she was gone.
The available online record confirms that Locke died on May 14, 2026, and that gun-violence databases classify her death as a fatal shooting in Puyallup, but the investigative story behind that shooting has not been publicly documented in detail in the sources currently available. No publicly indexed report located for this synopsis identifies a suspect, and no arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction connected specifically to Locke's death could be found. Unless additional police, medical-examiner or court records are released, the circumstances surrounding the gunfire that ended Locke's life remain largely outside the public record.
