A 24-year-old man found guilty in a jury trial of four counts of aggravated first-degree murder for shooting four people to death in a Tacoma neighborhood was sentenced Friday to life in prison in a hearing where tensions ran high.
While relatives of the people killed by Maleke Dominique Pate told the court of the pain he had brought them and their families, the defendant mumbled and spoke over them, forcing speakers to raise their voices to be heard in a courtroom packed with people.
Four sheriff's deputies hovered around Pate while the proceeding went on, and he was fitted with a stun belt. A person in the courtroom gallery said "gag him" after a verbal exchange between the judge and the defendant. Superior Court Judge Susan Adams asked the gallery not to add to the tensions.
Pate's continuous interruptions led Adams to pause the proceedings while prosecutors considered how to proceed. Pate was led away from the room. After a brief recess, Adams heard from prosecutors and the defense, and she ordered that the hearing would continue with Pate listening in via Zoom from the third floor of the Pierce County Jail.
A projector flickered on some time later, showing Pate and one of his public defense attorneys seated in a small room while deputies stood behind them. In the courtroom, the victims' relatives continued to speak.
Pate was convicted in March of the Oct. 21, 2021, shooting following a nine-day trial in which the defense called no witnesses. Though no motive has been proven, the state has claimed that Pate, who frequented a shooting range near Puyallup in the year before the shooting, wanted to know what it felt like to kill.
In court Friday, deputy prosecuting attorney Sunni Ko said for much of the case, the state thought there was no motive, but they were wrong. A motive had been staring them in the face since the beginning, she said, but they refused to face it because the truth was too horrific, too frightening, too unspeakable.
"He wanted to see what it felt like to kill real people with real bullets," Ko said. That was the reason. Simple. Case closed."
The victims were Maria Nunez, 42; her son, Emery lese, 19; Nunez's brother, Raymond Williams, 22; and Williams' girlfriend, Natasha Brincefield, 22.
The shooting began when Pate approached a blue sedan parked behind a townhouse on Everett Avenue and opened fire with a 9 mm handgun on the four people gathered there.
Brincefield was shot first, according to prosecutors, killed by a bullet to the head. He then shot Brincefield's boyfriend, Williams, the same way, followed by Nunez, who had stopped at her mother's home that afternoon in the Salishan neighborhood after picking up her son, Iese, from his job at the Krispy Kreme outside the Tacoma Mall.
Iese ran from the gunfire that erupted in an alley behind the home to the front yard. Pate chased and felled the teen with a shot to the leg. Prosecutors said Pate slowed his chase to a walk and stood over Iese while he begged "No, no, no" before he was shot three more times, in the cheek, shoulder and head.
Pate was 22 at the time. Because he was convicted of aggravated first-degree murder, the only punishment available to Judge Adams was life in prison without possibility of parole. Ultimately, she sentenced Pate to four consecutive life sentences.
Relatives of 4 murdered victims address the court
Seven relatives of the victims spoke during the sentencing hearing. Among them were sisters, a husband, a mother, close friends and daughters. Even more people had victim impact statements to submit, prosecutors said, and their testimony was recorded in a video that was marked as an exhibit for sentencing.
Many of those who addressed the court directly Friday recounted the horrific moments when they learned their loved ones had been killed in a shooting, and the regular days and nights that led up to it.
Tiburcia Iese, daughter of Nunez and sister to Emery, described the last time she saw her brother. He had taken the day off from work, and they stayed up watching the first Demon Slayer movie, laughing and crying together. She left home the next day to spend a week with her sister.
When she returned, Iese said her brother and mother weren't where she'd left them. Their murders left her "drowning" in guilt, and she said she knew if she'd stayed home that week, she would have been in that car, too.
"The kind of guilt that leaves you frozen for two years," the sister said. "The kind of guilt that makes you forget to take care of yourself. The kind of guilt that causes so much self hatred. The guilt that left me ruined was never my guilt to hold."
Inocente Freeman, Nunez's second-oldest daughter, remembered watching the four caskets carried at the funeral, dropping small gifts into her mother's hands, and seeing her brother's disfigured, unrecognizable face. She said she wondered who could be evil enough to take four lives this way.
"What about my mother was so shootable?" Freeman said.
Kathina Brincefield, Natasha Brincefield's mother, testified earlier in the hearing, telling the court that she wakes up every day and realizes her daughter is no longer here.
"I hate that I cannot talk to my daughter," Kathina Brincefield said. "I cannot interact with her and find out how her day is, answer her questions, find out if she has any girls' nights, or if her and Raymond have any plans. All that was taken away."
Williams' older sister, Elena Mayoral, spoke of how her brother had stepped up as an uncle despite being the youngest of seven siblings. He had given his nephews "forever memories" she said, sparring with them outside with boxing gloves, spending the day at the state fair or taking a trip to the waterfront to scooter.
Her oldest son has grown a lot in the last few years, Mayoral said, and he recently came to her to ask about shaving his mustache. The boy broke down and cried — Mayoral's son told her this was something he would have asked "Tio Raymond."
Mayoral said she could tell the court everything about Raymond, but she didn't think Pate deserved to know him. After Friday, Mayoral said Pate would become a ghost to her, and she would no longer fear him.
Lauvale Iese speaks for his wife and son
The last relative to speak was Lauvale Iese, a longtime pastor to an Eastside congregation who lost his wife, a son and his brother-in-law in the shooting. He and Nunez are parents of seven children.
After thanking the court, prosecutors, detectives, police and witnesses, Iese asked Judge Adams if he could be the voices of the ones who weren't there.
"My name is Maria Nunez," Iese began.
Speaking as Nunez, Iese described how his wife woke early on the day of her death and made him a cup of coffee. After he left for work, Nunez got Emery up and helped him off to work. Back home, she spent a few hours with her sister, Mary, and went about the house chores. Later in the afternoon, Nunez left to pick up her son, and she was called to run an errand, something Iese said his wife would love to do for her family.
"I picked up Emery, went to my mom's house — never made it out," Iese said.
Iese did the same for his son and his mother, recounting what transpired in the hours that led up to the shooting. Iese said the only interaction his son had with him that day was a game of pool they played together on their phones. His mother, Iese said, messaged Nunez to say how much she loved her.
On paper, Iese said Pate is being held accountable for four deaths, but in Iese's heart, there is a fifth. The man said his mother had a heart attack a week after she heard news of the shooting.
Iese said he met his wife at age 13, and now they were separated by death. Evidence of her mercy and kindness is in the community, he said. Everyone knew her, and Iese said Nunez helped every homeless person she could, sometimes to his dismay. He recalled a time when Nunez brought a homeless man to their home, where they fed him and did what they could to help.
When Iese showed up on the scene of the shooting, he said the sight of his wife dead on the concrete mentally broke him. If he had one wish, Iese said it would have been for Pate to let him die with his wife, son and the others.
Iese then read Pate a verse from his son's Bible, which lay in front of him while he spoke. Iese said he may hate Pate, but the defendant needed to hear that God loved him.
"I don't wish Hell upon him," Iese said. "I would wish every evil before I wish Hell upon him. Your honor, the ones he took, there is no price on their life."
Pate's attorneys ask for shorter sentence
The defendant's attorneys from the Department of Assigned Counsel, Travis Currie and Jane Melby, disagreed with prosecutors' argument that the only punishment available to the judge was life in prison.
In court filings, the defense attorneys explained how they believed Pate's age and history of mental illness justified a shorter sentence. Currie and Melby requested Pate receive 34.25 to 45.66 years in prison, plus five years of flat time.
Numerous opinions authored by the Washington state and U.S. Supreme courts have recognized that juvenile offenders are different from adults due to differences in brain development and their capacity for change, according to the defense, and the courts have recognized that juvenile offenders are less culpable than adults.
Prosecutors strongly opposed giving Pate anything other than life in prison.
"What happened was not the act of a 'youth' whose brain hadn't matured," deputy prosecuting attorneys Ko and Lindsay Chenelia wrote in court filings. "These were the acts of a psychopathic murderer who needs to be kept off the streets for the remainder of his life."
The families of the victims and the community deserve to live and play in their neighborhoods without the threat or fear of Pate taking another innocent life, prosecutors wrote.
In court, Melby said she could only imagine what it's like to watch how Pate acts without some kind of background information. Referring to his prior disruptions, the attorney said the Pate in court Friday wasn't the same person she met in October 2021. She said Pate had a loving family who cares about him.
Melby said prosecutors wanted to claim that Pate did this because he wanted to kill someone, but no one knows why this shooting happened, and trying to vilify a person with a mental disorder doesn't help anyone.
"Sadly this is how mental illness does show itself at times," Melby said. "I mean sometimes it does show itself as somebody who cannot control themselves, who cannot take what the court is saying and act accordingly."
When it was Pate's turn to address the court before his sentence came down, the man spoke at length about issues he saw in the state's case. He said the murder weapon did not have his DNA on it, and a photo of him running from the crime scene only showed a man running from gunshots while listening to music. Pate spoke for nearly 20 minutes, often repeating himself.
Judge Adams then addressed the courtroom, and she imposed Pate's sentence.
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