911 recordings: Confusion and fear after Mukilteo shootings

Related: Ivanov bought gun 4 days before shootings, mother tells police

MUKILTEO — The gunfire finally stopped, but they didn’t know if the shooter was still among them.

They hid in closets, bathrooms and on the roof. They pleaded with emergency dispatchers to send help, their young voices quavering near panic. Their friends were hurt, maybe dead. Few attending the summer party knew their exact location, only that they were in Mukilteo at a home on a cul de sac overlooking the water.

“You need to hurry,” one young woman urged an emergency dispatcher. “I feel like my friends just got shot. You need to get here.”

“Firecrackers went off and now our friends are bleeding to death,” she said.

A young man in the middle of a 911 call urged a friend: “Come out here. Come out here. Shut the door. Stay quiet.”

He told the dispatcher he couldn’t talk long.

“Just send someone,” he said. “Just send someone on the way. Please. We need help.”

Another young man was on the roof with three others. He described hearing shots.

“I’m trying to hide,” he said.

SNOPAC, the 911 center based in Everett, released the recordings Tuesday in response to public records requests. SNOCOM, the dispatch center based in Mountlake Terrace, also released 911 calls and related records, including the emergency radio recordings.

Some 70 calls flooded into the centers in the minutes and hours after the July 30 shootings, including some from the parents of the fatally injured.

“I’m trying to still find my son who supposedly had a gunshot, and he’s on his way to a hospital and I don’t know which one,” Stacy Snitzler told a dispatcher. Snitzler’s son, Jordan Ebner, 19, did not survive.

Anna Bui and Jake Long, both 19, also were killed.

Will Kramer, 18, was shot in the back. He called for help at 12:18 a.m. Kramer can be heard moaning in pain on the 911 recording.

He said, “I need ambulances.”

The dispatcher asked his location, and Kramer said police had arrived. The line went dead.

Kramer continues to recover from his injuries at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

The violence erupted early that Saturday at a house in the Chennault Beach area, where up to 20 friends had gathered to hang out and catch up. University of Washington student Allen Ivanov, 19, is being held in connection with the deadly gunfire.

All of those involved knew each other and were graduates of Kamiak High School. They all had finished their first year of college.

Dispatch records show a call coming in at 12:07 a.m., reporting as many as 20 gunshots.

Two minutes later, dispatchers heard from a young man who lives in the home. He’d taken refuge at a neighbor’s house. He reported that two of his friends had been shot and were unconscious, unaware that there were other victims. He told the dispatcher he didn’t know who the shooter was.

“We were having a little party and somebody just came in and started firing,” he said.

He could be heard asking his friends: “Where are they? Where are they? Where are Jordan and Anna? They’re in the living room, of my house.”

At the same time, one young caller pleaded with a different dispatcher to send help.

He didn’t know how many people were injured or the address, just that the home was in the Chennault Beach neighborhood.

“Ma’am, we need someone here as soon as possible,” he said. “… It’s an (expletive) emergency.”

She asked him if he was running. He was out of breath.

“There were people shot. Someone pulled a gun. I did not see anything. I was upstairs,” he said. “I heard gunshots downstairs and there are people lying on the ground outside, that are dead.”

He described trying to hide and hearing wounded people moaning. The dispatcher asked if he was making it up.

“I’m not lying,” he said. “I promise you. We need (expletive) help.”

A person on the line at 12:11 a.m. was gasping and crying.

“Someone just came into my house and started shooting all my friends,” she said.

The young woman said she and others were hiding in a locked bathroom. It wasn’t her house. She didn’t know the address. Multiple people had been shot.

“I want you to stay in the bathroom. Do not leave the bathroom,” the dispatcher said.

The dispatcher pushed the young woman for an address. The caller said her friend was looking it up. The young woman repeated the address to the dispatcher.

Who is the shooter? the dispatcher then asked.

“It’s Allen Ivanov apparently,” the young woman said.

A young man who was nearby was handed the phone. He provided Ivanov’s name, saying the suspect had posted a photograph of an assault rifle recently on social media.

Again, the dispatcher told the young people to stay inside the house.

When police arrived, nearly a half-dozen young people still were hiding on the roof.

It took until just after 12:30 a.m. for officers to complete their first search of the house. They then began a second. A few minutes later, officers got Ivanov’s address and deployed a team there.

The paramedics tending to Kramer said they couldn’t bring their ambulance any closer, but they had room for one more patient.

Another medic inside the house responded: “It doesn’t look like we’ve got any we’re going to be able to send (out).”

Mukilteo police Sgt. Colt Davis could be heard on his radio just after 12:50 a.m., asking for a chaplain for the witnesses.

“They need some support,” he said.

Police got to Ivanov’s house just after 1 a.m.

“There are one or two lights on but we’re not going to knock until we come up with a game plan,” an officer said on the radio.

Police tracked down Ivanov as he used his cellphone. It “pinged” off towers near Lakewood and Tumwater.

Around 2 a.m., Washington State Patrol troopers arrested him along I-5 near Chehalis. Police found a loaded semiautomatic rifle on the passenger seat and an empty magazine nearby, according to court documents.

Ivanov allegedly admitted to detectives that he opened fire with a Ruger semiautomatic rifle, similar to an AR-15, court papers say. He reportedly told detectives that the violence was motivated by his anger and jealousy over failed plans to reconcile with Bui, his former girlfriend.

Ivanov reportedly told police he was spying on the party when he spotted Bui. He allegedly went back to his car, read the gun’s instruction manual and returned to the house. He told police he first shot a male partygoer who came across his hiding place.

“He stated that it was too late to turn back, and once he had pulled the trigger his adrenaline kicked in,” Mukilteo police detective John Ernst wrote in court papers.

Ivanov is in jail, charged with aggravated murder and attempted murder. Prosecutors allege that Bui’s murder is a domestic-violence crime. Prosecutors also charged Ivanov with assault for firing at the party’s host. That young man told police he felt a bullet hit the ground near his foot as he ran.

Prosecutors have until next week to refile the charges into Superior Court. If Ivanov remains charged with aggravated murder, Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney Mark Roe will have to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

Ivanov allegedly bought the gun at Cabela’s in Tulalip four days before the shootings. He returned to Cabela’s on July 29 to buy a second 30-round magazine, court papers say. His father told police his son wanted the weapon “for self defense, because he was afraid at home,” according to a search warrant. The documents made public so far do not provide any other context for that statement.

Detectives reported that Ivanov told them the gun was a symbol of power.

At the crime scene, detectives found a jacket with Ivanov’s identification inside, along with a pair of binoculars. A package for binoculars was found in Ivanov’s car, court papers said.

The 911 recordings document how police and others scrambled. Among those seeking information was a Harborview nurse. The Seattle hospital had received word of the Mukilteo shootings and wanted to confirm that reports about multiple victims were true.

“Yes. It is happening,” the dispatcher replied.

Dispatchers also took calls from panicked parents who were unable to reach their children. They asked if police had released the names of the victims. One man, a pilot, told a dispatcher his wife was in hysterics. Their daughter was at the party. She wasn’t answering her phone.

Ivanov’s mother called dispatchers multiple times, asking whether there had been a shooting. She had been on the phone with her son before he was pulled over by police.

Jordan Ebner’s father also called 911 that night.

“I got a phone call from my son’s friend, saying that my son was shot,” Brad Ebner told the dispatcher. “He was in Mukilteo at a friend’s house … And I just want to call and find out what’s going on because I don’t have any information or anything.”

“Can you tell me a little about your son? What’s his name?” the dispatcher asked.

“His name is Jordan Ebner. He was at a friend’s house,” the Lake Stevens man said.

Reporters Eric Stevick, Kari Bray, Chris Winters and Sharon Salyer contributed to this story.