On the evening of November 30, 2016, Tacoma Police Department Officer Reginald Jake Gutierrez, 45, responded with a partner to a domestic disturbance in East Tacoma where a man had locked his wife out. Inside the home officers found 38-year-old Bruce Randall Johnson and his two young children. As Gutierrez went up the stairs to the second floor and announced he wanted to talk, Johnson ambushed him and shot him multiple times. Johnson also beat the fallen officer with a 20-gauge shotgun, breaking Gutierrez’s leg and severing a femoral artery. Gutierrez was pulled from the house and taken to a hospital but died of his injuries.

A standoff that lasted nearly 11 hours followed, during which Johnson barricaded himself and used his children as human shields. In the early hours of the next day a Pierce County Sheriff’s Office SWAT sniper shot and killed Johnson; the two children were not physically harmed and no arrests were made. Two weeks before the shooting, officers had stopped Johnson at the Tacoma Mall, found the same shotgun in his car, and returned the weapon to him despite an active warrant; Gutierrez’s three daughters later filed a $21 million claim against the city alleging the earlier encounter could have prevented their father’s death.

Are there readers who knew Officer Gutierrez or have information about the November 2016 encounter at the Tacoma Mall?