In the pre-dawn hours of February 17, 2019, 19-year-old Raul Cuadros was shot and killed in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box on Evergreen Way in Everett, Washington. His death was the culmination of a drug deal arranged over Facebook, where both parties arrived with the intent of robbing the other. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner's Office later confirmed the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the chest and ruled it a homicide.
Cuadros had accompanied a 27-year-old woman,
Brianna Reynolds, to meet Christopher Phelps for a purported drug transaction. However, they allegedly planned to rob Phelps. Unbeknownst to them, Phelps did not come to the meeting. Instead, he sent Kodi Anderson and David Randall Wright, seeking retaliation for a prior incident where Anderson had been set up and robbed by Reynolds and two men a few days earlier. Anderson and Wright arrived with their own plan to rob Reynolds.
The situation quickly escalated in the parking lot. Anderson and Wright confronted Cuadros and Reynolds, demanding Reynolds' purse. Cuadros, who was carrying an unloaded revolver, stepped in to intervene. As the confrontation continued, the two men followed Reynolds as she tried to walk away, and she deployed pepper spray. In the ensuing chaos, Wright shot Cuadros once in the chest. Security footage captured much of the incident, though it skipped forward three crucial seconds at the moment of the shooting. Cuadros was pronounced dead at the scene at 3:53 a.m.
The investigation led to the arrest of five individuals connected to the fatal shooting. David Randall Wright, 31 at the time, was identified as the shooter and was arrested on February 20. He was later convicted of first-degree murder and in October 2020, was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Christopher Phelps, who set up the meeting, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, criminal assistance, and a drug charge, receiving a 12-year sentence. Kodi Anderson pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree robbery and was sentenced to nearly three years. The getaway driver, Raymond Tannehill, also pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree robbery and received a sentence of just over two and a half years. Brianna Reynolds was also arrested for tampering with evidence after she allegedly took the revolver from Cuadros after he was shot.
