EVERETT — A party at Wiggums Hollow Park celebrating a 20-year-old man getting out of prison apparently ended in gunfire, injuring two, according to search warrant papers written by the Everett Police Department.
The shots were reported around 8:20 p.m., March 22. Police initially found bullet casings, but no victims or suspects. Witnesses saw people running and two vehicles taking off from the Delta Neighborhood park.
Not long after, detectives learned two men had been admitted into hospitals with gunshot wounds.
The man who’d just been released from prison the previous month went to the emergency room at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. He apparently had been shot in the shoulder and stabbed in the arm, but he wouldn’t speak with officers. Three people with him claimed not to know anything, only that the man asked to be picked up at the park. The wounds were not considered serious.
Afterward, a woman told officers that she had been at the park with others, celebrating the man’s release from prison. Everyone was calm, she said. They were drinking, eating carne asada and playing basketball. But after she used the bathroom, everyone stopped talking. They looked like they were arguing and didn’t want her to know about what, she said.
The woman left with two others. Ten minutes later, the man called, asking them to pick him up. He said he was shot, but didn’t say anything else.
The next morning, officers discovered a 17-year-old boy had gone to the Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon. He had a bullet in his hip. He claimed that he was shot in town “somewhere.”
Officers spoke with the boy’s girlfriend, who said she picked him up from Wiggums Hollow Park the night before. They were being fired at as they drove off, she said, and someone sitting behind her was apparently shooting back. She recalled bullet casings hitting her in the head as she drove off. But, she told police, she didn’t know who would have had a gun in her car.
The SUV she drove had about seven bullet holes in the passenger side. Two windows were broken. Police asked for a search warrant to look for more evidence inside the vehicle.
No arrests were made as of Friday.
Zachariah Bryan: 425-339-3431; zbryan@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @zachariahtb.
