Violent times

A man gunned down in his living room. A divorced father executed in a grocery store parking lot. An elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s suffocated in his own home. A burglar making a break for it shot dead in the forest.

This morbid litany would represent a pretty bad decade for violent crime in an area with the population of Nez Perce County. But these tragic incidents, and several others, have one thing in common: They’ve all happened in the past year, most within the last few months.

They also have another commonality: They are putting a tremendous strain on area law enforcement, from the detectives putting in long hours to ensure that justice is served, to the prosecutors pressing the cases in court.

Nez Perce County Prosecutor Justin Coleman said that as far as he can tell, the number of cases piling up in his office, especially first-degree murder charges, is unprecedented.

“I haven’t found a time when we’ve had that many pending, at least in my memory,” Coleman said of homicides and other violent crimes that have seemed to erupt every time he turns around.

Coleman has also sounded the alarm over a sharp increase in domestic violence incidents. According to his count, an average of 56 cases per year from 2017-19 jumped up to 71 cases in 2020, a 26 percent increase.

Lewiston Police Department Chief Budd Hurd has also been looking at the numbers. And while there has been less property crime in the last year, Hurd has also noticed that people seem to be opting to settle their differences with violence.

“The domestics, the violent crimes, the batteries and other crimes against people, those went up,” Hurd said, adding that societal unrest and the coronavirus pandemic have almost certainly played roles in the disturbing trend. “People were probably homebound more, so we saw less burglary crimes, theft crimes. But people weren’t getting along as well either.”

Incidents pile up

The violent crime wave began to swell June 7, when Lewiston police arrested Mark L. Hopson, 60, on a first-degree murder charge for allegedly suffocating his 94-year-old father, Billy R. Hopson, at their Prospect Avenue home. According to court records, Hopson allegedly killed his father to put him “out of his misery” since he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Hopson has pleaded innocent to the crime, and a jury trial is set to begin May 3.

The next incident came on Aug. 4, when Daren M. McCann, 57, of Lewiston, allegedly fired his 9 mm AR-style rifle into the back of a fleeing Spokane man he had just caught inside his Soldier’s Meadow cabin.

Jerry Glass Jr., 49, reportedly had been burglarizing other cabins in the area after speeding away from a Whitman County traffic stop two days earlier. Court documents allege McCann was checking his cabin and a friend’s when he encountered Glass and marched him at gunpoint down a nearby road to find a cellphone signal so he could call police.

But Glass bolted, and McCann allegedly shot him once in the center of his back as he fled. He is charged with second-degree murder, and a trial is scheduled for July 17.

The month of August saw another violent fatality, this time in Peck. According to court documents, Frank J. Frost, 67, allegedly kicked his roommate Stephen F. Parsons in the head during a fight over some windows in their residence that were left open.

Parsons died about a week later in a Spokane hospital, leading the prosecutor’s office to amend an initial charge of felony aggravated battery to voluntary manslaughter. But Coleman said his office elected to drop that charge pending the results of a specialized autopsy. If those results support a voluntary manslaughter charge, he will refile.

While those events were troubling, the next two spasms of violence came in rapid succession and shocked the community. On Jan. 8, police allege that Clyde K. Ewing, 43, and his 16-year-old son, Demetri X. Ewing, rode bicycles from a Clarkston motel to a Seventh Avenue home in Lewiston allegedly to settle some kind of dispute over a stolen gun and backpack, according to court records.

Once there, the Ewings allegedly entered through the back door, restrained a female resident with zip ties, then shot Samuel R. Johns, 31, in the living room, killing him. Police used witness statements and security video from neighbors to track down the suspects, whom they arrested a few days later.

Both Ewings are facing first-degree murder charges, and Demetri Ewing is being charged as an adult. Their preliminary hearings in Nez Perce County Magistrate Court are set for Wednesday.

Then, not even a month later, James R. Brashear, 67, of Winchester, allegedly went to the Lewiston Rosauers supermarket to confront his former son-in-law, John A. Mast. Mast, a 40-year-old South Dakota resident, was expecting to pick up his two children after a bitter four-year custody battle with Rebecca Brashear-Mast, his ex-wife.

Brashear-Mast had made allegations that Mast sexually abused the children, but no charges were ever filed and a judge had recently agreed that the parents should share custody. But according to court documents, Brashear brought his Glock 9 mm handgun to the exchange and allegedly shot Mast multiple times.

Police say Brashear immediately confessed to the crime. He is charged with first-degree murder, and a preliminary hearing is set for March 31.

The bloodshed spilled over into Asotin County just last week with the apparent domestic violence homicide of a Clarkston woman in her home. According to Clarkston police, John C. Weber, 54, allegedly shot his girlfriend, Kymberly Berreman, in the head at their Fifth Street home in Clarkston last Sunday morning. Weber initially claimed Berreman shot herself, but police charged him with second-degree murder over alleged inconsistencies in his version of events.

Not all of the violence has been fatal. For instance, Douglas L. Tibbitts, 52, is facing felony charges of aggravated battery with a weapons enhancement for allegedly shooting his cousin, Aaron T. Brewer, 39, in the chest in late January. The two had reportedly been drinking at Tibbitt’s North Lewiston trailer on the night of the incident when an argument led to the shooting, according to court documents.

And not all the violence has been felony-level. As Coleman noted, domestic battery and domestic assault cases — which are often misdemeanors — have spiked during the pandemic. The trend has gotten so troubling that last month he took the step of issuing a public statement about the warning signs of domestic violence, and directions for how victims can access support services.

In the same statement, Nez Perce County Coroner Josh Hall said suicides rose by 32 percent in 2020, from an average of 10 in the three previous years to 14. He said pandemic isolation may contribute to suicidal thoughts, and also offered resources for those who need help.

Considering a cause

Coleman was reluctant to pin the increase in violent crime on anything in particular. But Hurd said he sees a clear connection to two factors: the COVID-19 pandemic and deep political divisions in the country.

“When you look at the nation as a whole, look at the unrest we’re seeing on that level, it has trickled down,” Hurd said. “We haven’t effectively dealt with these things for many, many years. In a lot of ways, I think people are physically and mentally tired. And when you see this kind of attitude, it starts to build the pressures that we’re seeing with the way people are handling things.”

Much of the fatigue can also be attributed to people being largely cooped up over the last year because of their own precautions and pandemic restrictions, he added, since most Americans just aren’t used to being told what to do to such an extent.

There is precedent in human history for violent eruptions during pandemics. Stephanie Mooers Christelow, a professor emeritus of medieval history at Idaho State University, has studied the effects of pandemic quarantines on European society. Christelow cited “The Decameron,” a collection of 14th century novellas by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio that includes descriptions of the use of quarantine and the growth of violence during the plague of 1347-48.

“The Decameron” has scenes of wild behavior and societal disorder, she said. In two excerpts, Boccaccio wrote, “People behaved as though their days were numbered, and treated their belongings and their own persons with equal abandon,” and “In the face of so much affliction and misery, all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and been extinguished in our city.”

Still, the plague did not exist in isolation and a combination of disasters contributed to conflict and crime, Christelow wrote in an email to the Lewiston Tribune.

“Famine and unemployment led to poverty and social disorder culminating in theft by gangs of either noble youths or peasants,” she said.

The aftermath takes a toll

Coleman said the increased criminal workload is taking its toll on the attorneys and staff members in his office. They’ve also been burdened by the efforts of Patrick J. Nuxoll to get a new trial after his first-degree murder conviction for slashing David Cramer to death in 2015, the upcoming sentencing hearing for Cole Marcell in the first-degree murder of Sarah Warden in 2018, and the retrial of Pompeyo Salazar-Cabrera in a misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter case from 2018.

“There’s a real impact for any one homicide case on a prosecutor’s office in a community the size of ours,” Coleman said. “And when you multiply that by five, it really starts to strain things. So we have to make some adjustments and be more mindful of the wellbeing of the staff and employees I have here so they don’t get overworked.”

Coleman said he hasn’t yet gone to the county commissioners to ask for extra funding to hire more help. The office builds contingencies into its budget for a certain number of costly legal proceedings, but if those funds are maxed out, he will ask for more money.

Hurd said all the extra work can take a toll on his staff as well.

“A lot of people don’t realize that homicides and some other violent crimes take a lot of work,” he said. “You’re constantly doing follow-up all the way up to the trial, and sometimes through the trial. Those cases are brutal on detectives.”

The strain has been even more acute since the department is down five sworn officers, and will soon lose its lead sex crimes detective to 14 weeks of maternity leave. That will shift even more work onto the remaining staff.

Hurd is in the midst of a department-wide reorganization he hopes will bring more efficiency. And he will ask the city council for more funding to make the new structure work, he said.

As far as the current climate, the chief believes that Americans are strong and civil enough in their hearts to exit the pandemic tunnel with their senses intact.

“When we come out of this, we’re going to come back,” he said. “To me, that’s what we do. We usually put our differences beside us. I think we’ll get back to that stage, and we’ll come out of this better.”

Whether that has an impact on the recent spate of violence remains to be seen, however.

Mills may be contacted at jmills@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2266.

An average of 56 domestic violence cases per year from 2017-19 jumped up to 71 cases in 2020, a 26 percent increase. — Nez Perce County Prosecutor Justin Coleman

Suicides rose by 32 percent in 2020, from an average of 10 in the three previous years to 14. — Nez Perce County Coroner Josh Hall