On the evening of November 30, 2016, a White/Caucasian male named Reginald Jake Gutierrez, a 45-year-old officer with the Tacoma Police Department, responded to what would be his final call. He and his partner were dispatched to a domestic disturbance at a home in East Tacoma where a man had locked his wife out. Inside the residence was 38-year-old Bruce Randall Johnson, along with his two young children.
Known for his calm demeanor and skill in de-escalating volatile situations, Officer Gutierrez made entry into the home in an attempt to speak with Johnson.
As Gutierrez ascended the stairs to the second floor, calling out that he just wanted to talk, Johnson ambushed him. He opened fire, shooting Gutierrez multiple times. Johnson also used the 20-gauge shotgun to beat the fallen officer so severely that it resulted in a broken leg and a severed femoral artery. Other officers who had responded to the scene were able to enter the house and pull Gutierrez out, rushing him to a local hospital, but he succumbed to his wounds.
What followed was a tense standoff that lasted for nearly 11 hours. Johnson remained barricaded inside the home, using his own children as human shields. The ordeal finally came to an end in the early hours of the next day when a Pierce County Sheriff's Office SWAT sniper shot and killed Johnson. The two children were physically unharmed. No arrests were made as the sole suspect was killed at the scene.
In the aftermath, it was revealed that Johnson had a prior interaction with law enforcement just two weeks before the fatal shooting. He had been stopped at the Tacoma Mall exhibiting bizarre behavior, wearing a "sheriff" hat and carrying a rifle case. Officers found the same shotgun in his car that would later be used to kill Gutierrez. Despite having an active warrant for his arrest at the time, police did not take him into custody and returned the weapon to him, simply writing a field incident report. This led Gutierrez's three daughters to file a $21 million claim against the city of Tacoma, asserting that their father's death could have been prevented had the police department acted differently during the earlier encounter.
