In a quiet home in Spokane, Washington, the life of Keli Jo Weber-Lovitt, a 50-year-old Caucasian woman, came to a sudden and violent end on April 7, 2018. Her death, caused by a gunshot wound to the head, was not a simple tragedy but the culmination of a volatile domestic situation. The person responsible was her boyfriend, 49-year-old Howard Lacey, a man with a history of violent crime.
On that fateful Saturday evening, a heated argument erupted between Keli and Lacey in the bedroom
they sometimes shared in a house on East 8th Avenue. A roommate, Marvin Smith, who was in the home at the time, later recounted to police that he heard yelling from their room. The shouting was abruptly silenced by the sound of a single gunshot. Moments later, Lacey emerged from the bedroom, a. 40 caliber handgun with a distinctive skull and crossbones on the handle in his possession, and confessed to Smith, "I need your help. I think I just shot her."
Lacey's immediate actions were not those of a person seeking help for a loved one. He prevented Smith from entering the room, claiming Keli was already dead, and offered a conflicting account of the event, stating, "She went for the gun and it went off." Smith, unsettled by the situation, left the house with his girlfriend in Lacey's truck and promptly called 911 to report the shooting. Meanwhile, Lacey remained in the house for a short time before fleeing to the home of another girlfriend, Karen Nelson. He arrived at her residence visibly upset and confessed to the shooting. Nelson urged him to surrender to the authorities and began driving him, ostensibly to find a police station, before they were pulled over and Lacey was taken into custody.
When law enforcement entered the home on East 8th Avenue, they discovered Keli's body on the floor of the bedroom. Investigators immediately suspected the scene had been tampered with to suggest a suicide. Lacey was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, with his bond set at $1 million. The investigation revealed Lacey was a convicted felon with prior convictions for aggravated assault, felony DUI, and failure to register as a violent offender. In the face of the evidence against him, which included witness testimony and his own incriminating statements, Lacey's attorneys initially planned to argue the shooting was an accident or in self-defense. However, he ultimately pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm. In December 2019, Howard Lacey was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for the death of Keli Jo Weber-Lovitt.
