32nd Tacoma Homicide of 2022: Jeaneane Mattis
In the early morning hours of September 4, 2022, a car pulled up near 58-year-old Jeaneane Mattis’s trailer behind a medical clinic in the 3700 block of South Cedar Street. The two men inside the car were looking for a man called ‘Taco’ who lived in a nearby trailer, but Taco wasn’t home. The man who had been in the passenger seat got into a confrontation with Jeaneane when she insisted that they leave. Even when the man put a gun to Jeaneane’s head, a witness said she still insisted that they both leave.
What happened next is subject to debate. The 53-year-old man with the gun claims the driver told him to shoot her. The driver claims he was simply sitting in the car. The witness had returned to his own vehicle. The man with the gun shot Jeaneane in the head, got back in the the car, and left the scene.
Police responded to reports of gunfire and found Jeaneane Mattis dead in a pool of blood. Jeaneane is the 32nd Tacoma homicide of 2022 and the second of three homicides in the first five days of September 2022.
The driver of the vehicle was identified and arrested a little over a week after Jeaneane’s death. This was his third strike. The 53-year-old man responsible for her death wouldn’t be charged until April of 2023, at which time he’d already been charged for two homicides on Hosmer that occurred a couple months after Jeaneane’s murder in November of 2022.
Jeaneane had the nickname of ‘Marcy’. Her social media posts were typically encouraging and inspirational. Earlier in the year, she’d gone through a hard breakup, but it’s clear she wasn’t going to let that break her or change who she was. What little I could find about Jeaneane’s life tells me she was someone who weathered adversity with obstinance. It takes a certain sort of courage to tell a man with a gun to your head that he needs to leave. And though her life ended due to a senseless act of violence, her memory lives on.
The comment section is reserved for friends and family who knew Jeaneane and want to share thoughts or memories of her.
- Jack Cameron
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