EVERETT — The girl sent Jaylen Fryberg’s dad a text message, asking him to make sure his son didn’t do anything stupid.
When she sent that text, at 10:43 a.m. on Oct. 24, she didn’t know that Jaylen, a 15-year-old freshman, already had shot five of his friends and killed himself in a Marysville Pilchuck High School cafeteria.
She and Jaylen had ended a long-term relationship the weekend before after going together to the homecoming dance.
In the days after, he’d been texting her and sending messages through friends, insisting that she return his calls.
At times he was angry. At times he was sad and apologetic. He repeatedly threatened to kill himself — and then said he was just kidding.
Jaylen’s former girlfriend was worried that he wasn’t thinking straight.
That morning, Jaylen sent the girl’s sister a picture of a handgun. He said he wanted to talk to his former girlfriend.
“So I called him. And told him to stop,” the former girlfriend wrote Jaylen’s father. “He was saying how even before him &I broke up he was thinking about this. &when I asked him why he said ‘I don’t want to be here anymore’ Then I told him I was gonna call you and then I hung up. Then he messaged my sister &said ‘okay … I lied .. I just wanted her to talk to me.’”
The girlfriend really didn’t know what was going through Jaylen’s head, she wrote his dad.
“Please make sure he doesn’t do anything THAT stupid .. Please.”
Minutes after she talked to Jaylen, the Tulalip boy sent his funeral wishes via text to more than a dozen relatives.
“Family members almost immediately began calling or texting him,” Everett police detective Andrew Williams later wrote. “This is literally occurring as he is murdering his friends in the cafeteria. Several family members respond to the school while they are attempting to reach him. By this time, he is dead.”
The text messages were released Thursday after Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Richard Okrent ruled that the information was necessary to fully understand what police learned about the shootings.
Attorneys for the girl, who is 15, maintained she would be irreparably harmed if the contents of the private communication she exchanged with Jaylen were not kept secret.
Okrent said he understood the concerns raised on the girl’s behalf but found the messages were important to the police investigation. People need to know what happened, perhaps to spot signs that similar violence may be brewing, the judge said. The knowledge also may help in healing wounds from this tragedy, he added.
“Those are legitimate public interests,” Okrent said.
About 250 pages of records were released within an hour of the judge’s ruling Thursday, just after the close of the business day. Lawyers representing the girl had made a last-ditch attempt to get the state Court of Appeals to intervene.
Another 1,400 pages of police reports on the fatal shootings were released Tuesday in response to public records requests from The Daily Herald and numerous other media outlets around the country.
The Marysville School District and the Tulalip Tribes were required to file records requests to receive the documents, too.
“We continue to pray for the families and community members who have lost their loved ones,” Tulalip Tribal Chairman Mel Sheldon Jr. said in a prepared statement regarding this week’s developments. “The Tulalip Tribes remain committed to providing support to youth, families, and community members still struggling to move beyond this tragedy. Our collaboration with the Marysville School District, the City of Marysville, and other community partners has proven critical to the healing process and we will continue to work together to promote wellness and resiliency across our communities.”
Freshmen Zoe Galasso, Shaylee Chuckulnaskit and Gia Soriano, all 14 years old, and Andrew Fryberg, 15, died. Classmate Nate Hatch, then 14, survived a gunshot wound to his jaw.
Jaylen’s father, Raymond Fryberg, is scheduled to go to trial later this month on federal charges that he illegally possessed the handgun his son used. The weapon was taken from the console of the elder Fryberg’s pickup truck.
The texts were gathered by the Snohomish County Multiple Agency Response Team, a cadre of detectives pulled from throughout the county. In their final report, they said Jaylen’s motive remained uncertain but the killings were planned.
They pointed to a final text sent to his family. It described how he wanted his friends and cousins — “my ride or dies” — with him “on the other side.”
The team obtained months of messages but focused attention on the two weeks before the shooting.
There were more than 80 texts involving Jaylen, the girlfriend and other young people included in a police report.
The Everett detective who studied the conversations wrote that when Jaylen’s text messages to his former girlfriend began to go unanswered, it appeared “to send Jaylen deeper into depression.”
Three days before the shootings, Jaylen sent the girl texts saying: “The guns in my hand.” and “Ohk well don’t bother coming to my funeral.”
The next day the messages were darker still.
He wrote that he had set a date but didn’t elaborate.
“You have no idea what I’m taking about. But you will,” he wrote.
The day before the shootings, he wrote that he loved her.
“I need you to read my texts tomorrow,” he wrote. “Can you do that?
At 6:56 a.m on the day of the shootings, just a half-hour before his mother drove him to school, Jaylen again implored the girl to answer his texts.
In court papers filed on behalf of the girl and her tribe, Seattle attorney Thomas Ahearne argued that releasing the texts would expose the girl to “torture.”
The state’s public records laws are for “scrutinizing government, not scrutinizing teenage girls,” he said.
In preparation for Thursday’s hearing, the judge had the girl’s lawyer and Ramsey Ramerman, an assistant Everett city attorney who specializes in open government law, present him the records under seal. The city of Everett has coordinated the release of records in the case on behalf of SMART.
The judge said he read every page before deciding what should be released.
“The public needs to understand this,” he said of the information detectives found.
Scott North: 425-339-3431; north@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snorthnews.
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