Man sentenced to life with no parole for aggravated murder

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, December 20, 2016

EVERETT — There was no leeway.

Less than a week after he was convicted, Tye Fleischer was sentenced to life in prison Monday in a 2015 shooting rampage that killed two and injured another.

Just hours after deliberations started last week, a Snohomish County Superior Court jury found the 39-year-old Everett man guilty of aggravated murder as well as attempted first-degree murder. He faced an automatic sentence of life without parole.

Kevin Odneal and Irene “Deni” Halverson were killed in February 2015. A second woman was wounded.

Court papers say Fleischer knew Odneal and the woman who survived. He did not know Halverson, who’d stopped by the Everett home. She left behind two daughters, ages 8 and 25.

“Deni’s girls were her world, her joy, her love of life,” Halverson’s mother, Robyn Loeck, told the judge during sentencing.

“When (he) took my daughter’s life, he took mine, too,” she said. “He took a piece of Deni’s daughters’ lives as well.”

After Monday’s sentencing, Loeck said she and her daughter would call each other 10 times a day. She said her daughter grew up in Kitsap County loving the outdoors. As a mother, Halverson enjoyed doing crafts projects with her daughters.

Loeck said Monday’s sentencing closed a chapter, “but there is never going to be relief for my daughter’s death.”

Prosecutors said Fleischer was despondent after relapsing on methamphetamine, and he set out to kill a drug dealer as well as a tenant at the clean-and-sober house he managed who had relapsed. They believe he also planned to turn the handgun on himself.

He’d told a dispatcher the night of the shooting: “I’m not one to sit in prison for 15-20 years.”

He’d also told the dispatcher: “So I’m a junkie, I got clean, my kids deserve a better father. I’m just taking a couple of pieces of (expletive) that … hurt people out while I’m doing it.”

Prosecutors accused Fleischer of ambushing his victims as they approached his van, which was parked outside an Everett house. Detectives recovered 10 shell casings.

The house has been the scene of two other deadly shootings since 2008.

A niece of Odneal recalled an uncle who taught her to fish and enjoyed feeding horses with her. A sister said Odneal knew he had a family who loved him.

Moments before he was sentenced, Fleischer said he was emotional because people’s lives were lost, not because he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“I feel for the families, I do,” he said.

At trial, the defense argued that Fleischer acted in self-defense. An appeal is planned.

Superior Court Judge Richard Okrent didn’t buy the self-defense argument.

“You have made a tragedy of your life and a tragedy of other lives,” Okrent said.

Fleischer had been convicted three times of possessing methamphetamine between 2002 and 2012. During that time, he also had been convicted twice of possessing stolen property.

Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.