TULALIP – There was no crime scene. Months of wind and rain carried away any clues.
Tulalip Tribal Police officers Dave Lott and Marlin Fryberg Jr. couldn’t scour more evidence from the woods to help piece together the truth.
Sophia Solomon was found hanging from a cedar tree on the reservation on Dec. 22, 2004. Her boyfriend, Wesley Jefferson, told police Sophia had threatened to hang herself.
The signed death certificate said Sophia, 23, had died of asphyxiation by her own hand – suicide.
The circumstances of her death were long on rumors, but short on physical evidence. Yet her family and friends deserved a second look, the Tulalip officers said.
“You could say we started out with one leg and one arm tied behind our backs,” Lott said.
Lott and Fryberg started their investigation by going back to what they did have: an interview with Jefferson videotaped by Tulalip police the day Sophia was found.
On the tape, Jefferson shifts in his seat. He cries. He asks if they know how it happened.
He tells officers about suicide threats Sophia made during an argument. Jefferson tells how he and his teenage cousin searched the neighborhood for Sophia the night she disappeared.
It was the first time Lott had seen the tape. He and Fryberg agreed – something seemed off.
One statement stood out.
Jefferson told police he had heard Sophia say she was going to kill herself. He had then watched her grab a length of rope from her van and walk off toward the woods near her mother’s home.
Why didn’t Jefferson follow Sophia? Why didn’t he look in those woods for his girlfriend, the mother of his three children?
On the tape, Jefferson doesn’t have answers to those questions.
The officers decided they needed to go see Sophia’s mother, Tamara Hayes.
More questions
“My daughter didn’t kill herself,” Hayes told them, the same thing she’d been saying all along. She pointed to her grandchildren. “That’s why I know.”
“From that time forward I knew we needed to find out the truth, no matter where it led,” Lott said.
They asked Hayes to tell them about the night her daughter went missing.
Sophia and Jefferson were staying with her, and they had been arguing. That happened more and more. Sophia accused Jefferson of being unfaithful. They fought over the money she saved to make Christmas candy for the neighbor kids.
Sophia told her mother she just wanted Jefferson to leave. She was tired of the fights. Hayes watched her daughter walk out the door.
“I told her to come back. It was cold and she didn’t have a coat on,” Hayes said.
That was the last time she saw Sophia alive.
Back at the station, Lott and Fryberg hung up a large map of the neighborhood. Pushpins marked Hayes’ house and the houses Jefferson said he searched.
Rubber bands strung between the pushpins fanned out from a central location – the tree where Sophia was found.
The officers covered their walls with large sheets of white paper, where they wrote out what they knew and the questions that needed answers.
They retraced Jefferson’s steps. They stood where Jefferson said he stood as he watched Sophia walk down a street and turn the corner.
It would have been impossible for Jefferson to see Sophia from that spot.
They found someone who had seen the couple arguing at a teriyaki shop hours after Jefferson said he last saw Sophia.
The two officers lugged their laptop computers home and listened to the interviews with Jefferson and his cousin.
“We ate, drank and slept this case,” Fryberg said. “This whole case became personal.”
In the morning, they swapped ideas.
They traveled to the Lummi Indian Reservation to interview Jefferson and to track down other people who said they’d heard things.
There were parts that weren’t fitting together. The more answers they found, the more questions came up.
They turned to Tulalip Police Chief Jay Goss, who focused their attention on what they knew, and helped them see what was still missing.
Truth revealed
Before Sophia died, Lott and Fryberg hadn’t worked together much.
Lott, 40, arrived at the small department in 2003 from the Nisqually Tribal Police, where he was an officer for four years.
Fryberg, 38, grew up on the Tulalip reservation, where he’s raising his family.
He worked with the tribes’ young people, hoping his guidance and encouragement could keep them strong and focused.
The young people listened to him, so the tribal elders asked him to join the police department.
“We’ve bonded pretty good,” Fryberg said of his partner. “I’ve learned he has our community at heart. He has our people at heart.”
Through the case Lott saw doors open to Fryberg because of who he was and what he stood for with the tribes.
“The things he taught me, the knowledge he’s given me and the acceptance into the community and their trust will always be dear to me,” Lott said.
After they reopened the case, they showed the FBI what they had. The FBI investigates suspicious deaths of Indians on tribal land.
In May 2005, federal agents decided to call Jefferson in for an interview and a polygraph test.
About a week later, Lott and Fryberg made another trip to the Lummi reservation to talk to Jefferson’s 16-year-old cousin.
They knocked on the door.
The boy’s mother wasn’t surprised to see them. “I’ve been expecting you,” she told them.
The boy talked.
He was with Jefferson and Sophia at the teriyaki place.
The couple were arguing while driving back from the store. Jefferson stopped their van and Sophia ran into the woods. Jefferson followed her.
The boy followed.
He told police he watched the two pulling hair and struggling, then saw Jefferson choke Sophia.
As Sophia lay on the ground, Jefferson retrieved a rope from the van.
The boy said Jefferson threatened to beat him if he didn’t help, then knotted the rope around Sophia’s neck and put the loose end over a branch.
Jefferson told the boy to lift her body as he pulled the rope and tied it off, the boy said.
Then Jefferson and the boy drove to several houses, asking if neighbors had seen Sophia and planting the idea that she had threatened to kill herself.
The day after the boy revealed his secret, Jefferson was arrested on the Lummi Indian Reservation.
After Jefferson was behind bars, Lott and Fryberg went to see Hayes. It was time to deliver answers.
“To give her the truth was the most important thing,” Lott said. “There is healing in the truth.”
Hayes is thankful for the truth. Her daughter didn’t leave her children behind. Her soul is not in limbo.
“They were everything. … They listened to me. They promised they were going to solve it and they did,” Hayes said. “Until I die, their families are in my prayers.”
The officers are family now, Sophia’s younger sister, Cierra Williams, said.
“We love them. They’re part of our family forever.”
A guilty plea
Outside the courtroom, Lott fiddled with his tie.
Fryberg stared out the window of the fifteenth floor of the federal courthouse in Seattle.
They paced and finally sat next to Williams on a black couch.
Their voices hushed as they watched Hayes step to the other end of the hall. They bowed their heads as her tears fell.
“It all comes down to this hour,” Lott said, nervously wiping his hands on his pants.
The officers trailed after the family as the courtroom door was unlocked, and settled on a bench behind the family.
They fell silent as Jefferson was led into the courtroom.
“This case is extremely troubling. Not only did Mr. Jefferson take the life of Sophia Solomon, the mother of his children, but he covered it up,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman began.
“If it wasn’t because of the dogged work of law enforcement, especially Tulalip police, her death always would be considered a suicide.”
For months, Jefferson had maintained he was innocent.
Hayes finally heard in court what she had known in her heart.
Jefferson pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but chose not to speak inside the dark-paneled courtroom where Sophia’s family was gathered.
Jennifer Wellman, his defense attorney, told the court Jefferson had written the judge a letter expressing his remorse.
Jefferson was a young man with a drug and alcohol problem, not a cold-blooded killer, Wellman said. He acted on impulse, she said.
Then it was U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik’s turn to speak.
“He was operating very clearly when he killed Sophia Solomon and was acting clearly when he staged a coverup.
“Certain parts of me wish I could double, triple or even quadruple the sentence here.”
Lasnik then gave Jefferson 10 years in prison, the maximum under federal law.
Then Hayes chose to speak, rising from her seat.
“I’m Sophia’s mother.
“You killed a part of me when you took my daughter. I accepted you into my home as my son. You have turned me inside out. My heart hurts. My family didn’t deserve this.
“You’re cruel. But I forgive you, Wes. That’s what my daughter would have wanted.”
Meant to be
The FBI gave the Tulalip officers a plaque for their work on Sophia’s case, but there is so much more to do.
Lott and Fryberg focus on keeping drugs off the reservation, away from the kids. They hope it will make a difference.
“It’s devastating to look at what could have been,” said Lott, who recently was promoted to sergeant.
Some on the reservation see the pursuit of justice for Sophia as proof that all things happen for a reason.
A few months after Sophia was found, Fryberg lost his seat on the tribal council by a few votes.
That left him the time to run down the rumors about the young woman’s death.
Tribal elders have since told Fryberg he lost the election for a reason: He was meant to get to the truth.
He agrees.
“It is and was simply for the family,” Fryberg said.
“No matter what came out, we wanted them to know we tried. We owed it to this community, to the family and to Sophia to find out.”
Fryberg was elected back to the tribal council earlier this year.
The officers visit Hayes and her grandchildren, watching the children grow, urging Williams to go to college, and witnessing the strength of a grandmother raising another family.
Hayes misses her daughter’s company. She can’t watch their favorite movies, “Steel Magnolias” and “Forrest Gump,” because Sophia isn’t there to cry with her. They always said it wasn’t a good movie unless it made them cry.
She burned her daughter’s dog-eared bridal magazines – they held too many spoiled dreams.
She worries about being able to give her grandchildren the lives Sophia wanted for them. In grocery stores, the youngest ones still run to any woman who looks like their mother.
The truth is her burden. She will be the one to tell them Sophia didn’t leave them. She will have to tell them what took their mother away.
“My daughter, she lived for them. How am I ever going to be able to tell the kids how important she was?”
Reporter Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463 or hefley@ heraldnet.com.
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