Tacoma police have opened a homicide investigation after a man was shot and killed early Wednesday morning in the city's South End neighborhood. The killing unfolded in a quiet residential area, and by daybreak investigators had cordoned off part of the neighborhood as they worked to piece together what happened.
The shooting happened in the area of East D Street, east of Pacific. According to police, neighbors began calling 911 around 3 o'clock in the morning to report the sound of gunshots ringing out in the darkness.
Tacoma officers responded to the calls and found the man at the scene. They tried to save his life, but he could not be saved, and the case quickly became a homicide investigation that is expected to take investigators several hours to process.
One neighbor told reporters they did not think much of the loud sounds they heard overnight, given how many fireworks had been going off in the area since the Fourth of July. That confusion between fireworks and gunfire meant the gravity of what happened did not become clear until police arrived.
The investigation has taken up roughly two blocks of the residential neighborhood. Investigators and crime scene technicians were seen going in and out of a blue house, where bullet holes were visible in the window, the siding and the rain gutter. The victim was found not far from the front porch.
Detectives and forensic specialists spent the morning going door to door, looking for doorbell camera footage and speaking with neighbors who may have been getting up for work and could have seen or heard something useful to the case.
As the morning went on, the search narrowed to a named suspect. Authorities identified the man they are looking for as Hayes McLeod, described as twenty-four years old, five feet eight inches tall and around 115 pounds, and said he was believed to be driving a silver Toyota 4Runner. He had not been taken into custody as the manhunt spread.
The Tacoma shooting was also being weighed against a second killing that unfolded about ten minutes away in Puyallup at nearly the same time. Investigators with the Pierce County Sheriff's Office linked the two, saying the two men killed that morning were from the same family unit, while Tacoma police said they were not yet ready to formally connect the two cases.
The manhunt ended the following day. The Pierce County Sheriff's Office said Hayes McLeod, who had been sought in both the Tacoma and Puyallup killings, was located with the help of flock cameras and tracked to Lewis County early in the morning, before being shot and killed by police in Seaside, Oregon, a smaller community on the Oregon coast. No officers were hurt in the encounter, which was captured on body camera video released by the sheriff's office.