Third, Fourth, and Fifth Homicides of 2006

So part of the idea of chronicling the homicide rate in Tacoma in 2006 was to show the world at large that Tacoma really isn’t all that bad of a place. Unfortunately the criminals of Tacoma refuse to let me actually do that.

Yesterday, someone knocked on the door of a friend’s house a few blocks away from the University of Puget Sound. There was no answer, but the door was unlocked. He walked in and found not one, not two, but three dead bodies. All of a sudden the murder rate for Tacoma has more than doubled. Technically these are homicides 3, 4, and 5. Two men and a woman, all in their twenties.

Police aren’t saying much right now. Just that they died of ‘homicidal violence’. And since they aren’t saying much, everything I’m about to say is pure speculation.

I’d be willing to bet this one might actually get solved. You see, where the killer made the mistake was in killing more than one person. If you shoot a guy in Tacoma, you might get away with it. But you shoot two guys and a girl in a house by the local college, well that’s what cops like to call a Red Ball. The other thing the killer has going against him is that there aren’t a lot of reasons to kill three people. One person, there’s a hundred reasons. Two people, it’s probably some sort of love triangle. Fourteen people, hey, you’re a serial killer. But three? You’re looking at something that’s most likely drug related and really whatever it was, it wasn’t professional. Drug dealers want to make money. Cops running around trying to solve a triple homicide make that difficult.

Anyway, we’re now a third of the way to matching last year’s homicide rate and we’re only on the second month of the year. -Jack