A manhunt that stretched across two states has ended with the death of the man at its center. Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank has confirmed that the person wanted in connection with two homicides in Pierce County, Washington, is dead. The sheriff identified the man as twenty four year old Hayes McLeod, closing a fast moving and violent chapter that began in the pre dawn hours and ended hundreds of miles away on the Oregon coast.
According to investigators, the violence unfolded in the early morning. The first call came from Puyallup at around two forty in the morning, when a shooting and a homicide were reported. Responding officers found a thirty five year old man dead at the scene. What began as a single deadly incident would soon prove to be only the first in a pair of killings that rattled two neighboring communities.
A short time later, the danger moved to Tacoma. At around three in the morning, Tacoma police say a second victim was killed at a home off East D Street. The proximity of the two attacks, both in the same county and only minutes apart, quickly drew the attention of detectives who began to suspect that the two scenes were connected rather than random acts of violence.
For neighbors, the gunfire was impossible to miss. Residents near the scenes described being jolted awake by the sound of shooting, with one saying they heard what sounded like two sets of three shots and another describing a burst of shots fired all together. In all, as many as seventeen shots were captured on home security video, underscoring how intense and sudden the attacks were.
As the investigation widened, the search for the suspect moved south. The Sheriff's Office said McLeod was tracked in Lewis County early in the morning using flock cameras, the automated license plate readers that have become a common tool for law enforcement. From there the trail led out of Washington and into neighboring Oregon, where the pursuit would come to its final and fatal conclusion.
The end came in Seaside, a smaller community on the Oregon coast. Authorities said McLeod was shot and killed by police there sometime later, and that no officers were hurt in the encounter. What exactly McLeod was doing in Seaside remains unclear, and local police said they were working to release more information about the events leading up to the deadly contact in the coming hours.
Investigators from both Pierce County and Tacoma have described the killings as targeted, and said they believe the two homicides are linked. The sense of loss has been sharpened by the ordinary setting of the violence, with one neighbor noting that there had been a party at the Tacoma location over the holiday weekend, making the sudden bloodshed all the more difficult for the community to absorb.