$5M bail for suspect in deadly Lynnwood, Marysville shootings

LYNNWOOD — A 911 call captured the terror of a Lynnwood home invasion that left one person fatally shot and two others critically wounded early Thursday.

Police believe Gilbert “Alex” Escamilla, 31, had just fled the scene of another deadly shooting 25 miles north in Marysville, where he “executed” a man around 4 a.m. outside an apartment complex, according to police reports filed in court Friday.

The first shooting was witnessed by residents at Twin Lakes Landing. It was also caught on camera.

At 6:50 a.m., a woman inside a house at 164th Street SW and 48th Place W called 911, reporting in broken English that a man with a gun was fighting with her husband, according to a police report. The woman sounded “panicked and out of breath,” investigators wrote.

She told the dispatcher she’d been sleeping when the man broke in, and that the intruder was a stranger.

The couple lived in the house with their mother-in-law, who was visiting on a tourist visa, wrote Snohomish County sheriff’s detective Tedd Betts. Their two young children hid in a bedroom closet.

Multiple gunshots rang out over the phone. The woman, who broke down crying, said both her husband and mother-in-law were shot, according to the police report.

“He’s screaming,” she reportedly said. “He’s trying to open my door! My husband has the blood. He was shot.”

The woman’s voice “faded into the background” as it turned into screaming, Betts wrote. The dispatcher could hear another man yelling.

“I’ll take care of you, I’ll take care of you!” he reportedly said. “Stop screaming!”

Three more gunshots rang out, according to the police report. The call went quiet. The dispatcher tried to get the woman to respond. She didn’t.

First responders arrived to find the mother-in-law in the living room with a fatal gunshot to the head, investigators wrote. She was 68.

In adjacent bedrooms, the husband and wife were critically wounded. He had been shot at least twice in the chest, and she was shot near her eye, according to Betts’ report. The two children, ages 5 and 7, were uninjured.

The husband, 43, and wife, 32, were rushed to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Both remained in critical condition Friday, hospital spokesperson Susan Gregg said.

Investigators later found four 9 mm bullet casings on the back deck, down the deck’s stairs and in some vegetation at the bottom, Betts wrote. A shell casing that appeared to be from a .22-caliber gun was also found in the hallway.

A neighbor called 911 at 6:54 a.m.

“Heard two rounds of gunfire within the last three minutes,” he said.

Then he reported “at least eight gunshots,” coming from houses beyond a greenbelt. Just as he was about to hang up, there was another gunshot.

“Oh my God!” he said. “Now there’s a woman screaming!”

He could hear the sirens approaching.

Meanwhile, Escamilla stole the couple’s dark gray Toyota RAV4 and drove off, according to police. Sheriff’s deputies racing to the home saw the fleeing vehicle. The driver sped through the neighborhood at 80 mph and showed “no regard for deputies who were clearly standing behind several patrol vehicles,” the report says.

With help from a police dog and air support from the Washington State Patrol, deputies chased the Toyota until it turned into a private driveway off Norma Beach Road in Edmonds. There, the fleeing driver jumped out of the car. An infrared camera on the aircraft revealed he was hiding in bushes.

Sheriff’s deputies arrested the suspected shooter without further incident.

In custody, Escamilla made “spontaneous statements,” saying he was detoxing and needed methadone, according to the police reports. The suspect told investigators he last used drugs “two days before this happened,” and he “needed to be clear headed,” Betts wrote.

Investigators came to realize Escamilla was the suspect in the shooting three hours earlier in the parking lot of Twin Lakes Landing, in the 2800 block of 164th Street NE.

Security footage from 4 a.m. showed a man walk past Escamilla’s car, a white Hyundai with a yellow hood. Escamilla, in a light gray hoodie and dark pants, got out and confronted the man. The video showed a flash from the muzzle of the gun, causing the man to fall to the ground, begging for help, according to a detective’s report.

After about 15 seconds, the gunman walked up to him.

“Alex (Escamilla) pointed the pistol at (the man’s) head, paused for a second or two, and then fired the pistol,” Marysville detective Cori Shackleton wrote in a report.

On camera, the wounded man stopped moving. First responders pronounced him dead at the scene.

Britney Holt, a resident at Twin Lakes, said she and her friends witnessed the fatal gunshot from a nearby balcony.

“At that moment in time,” Holt recalled in an interview Thursday, “I was worried he was going to turn around and shoot us because we saw what he did.”

The identities of the slain people had not been released as of Friday afternoon.

The shooter fled in the Hyundai, apparently bound for Lynnwood.

A witness in Marysville told police Escamilla “uses fentanyl and is always angry,” and that day, he’d been looking for someone to help him steal motorcycles, court documents say. At least two witnesses recalled how, at some point before the shootings, Escamilla had shown them two guns: a .22- or .25-caliber pistol, as well as a handgun that looked like a 9 mm.

Two different calibers of shell casings were found near the body in Marysville, police wrote.

Escamilla appeared in Everett District Court in front of Judge Tam Bui on Friday. The courtroom was packed with reporters and TV cameras.

Deputy prosecutor Bob Langbehn sought probable cause to hold Escamilla in the two separate cases: one count of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault and one count of first-degree burglary.

Bui set bail at $5 million at the prosecution’s request. Escamilla remained in the Snohomish County Jail on Friday.

Escamilla had been convicted of felonies in 2011 and 2013: two home burglaries and a second-degree robbery. Court records suggest those crimes did not happen in Snohomish County.

In a standardized box asking for any objection to the suspect’s release, the Marysville detective wrote in the report: “He shot four people in one day.”

Maya Tizon: 425-339-3434; maya.tizon@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @mayatizon.