The man suspected of shooting two Pierce County sheriff's deputies before being killed in a shootout Tuesday has a violent criminal history.
Jeremy Darryl Dayton, 40, was convicted of his first crime at age 14. Since then, he's been in and out of prison serving time for selling crack cocaine, breaking his wife's jaw and beating and robbing a man.
He most recently was wanted for jumping bail on a $200,000 bond and failing to appear for a March 7 trial where he was charged with second-degree assault.
On Tuesday morning, the Pierce County sheriff's SWAT team assisted the South Sound Gang Task Force with serving a warrant on Dayton outside a mobile home in Spanaway.
Details on the shootout have not been released, but investigators said Dayton and members of the SWAT team exchanged gunfire.
Two deputies were injured in the shooting, one gravely and one seriously. Dayton was later pronounced dead.
Stacy Dayton told The News Tribune on Tuesday she married Jeremy Dayton in Tacoma in 2015. They met online in 2012, she said.
She described him "as a good man at one time." He was a union construction worker who helped raise her children from a previous relationship, treating them as his own, Stacy Dayton said.
Something changed in him in 2017 and they separated, she said, though they remained married.
"I don't know the man he became," Stacy Dayton said Tuesday.
She said her husband's previous stints in prison ruined him and that he might have slipped into drug use.
"Prison doesn't do them any good, especially when they are released without help," she told The News Tribune. "Jeremy did what he did, but maybe if the system had worked better, two cops wouldn't be shot and my husband wouldn't be dead."
Sheriff Ed Troyer said the team knew Dayton was "dangerous" because of his prior convictions, some of which included weapons.
In the most recent case, Dayton was accused of flying "into a rage" and knocking over several chairs when servers at a Tacoma lounge refused to serve him because he had been previously banned for fighting, according to court documents.
The victim followed Dayton into an alley to try and calm him down. Dayton punched the victim repeatedly in the head until he passed out, records say.
The victim — who was about 20 years older, 115 pounds lighter and six inches shorter — suffered a fractured cheek and bleeding in the brain. Doctors initially were not sure he would survive.
A witness called the attack the "most violent and aggressive thing I've ever seen," prosecutors wrote in charging papers.
Dayton was labeled a "persistent offender," which meant that if convicted as charged, he could have faced life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Several people wrote letters of support to the court, arguing that Dayton had turned his life around.
His mother said he was "living as a true grown up" and his brother insisted he was "on the right track." A friend said Dayton was hard-working with "a good pure heart."
Before last year's assault, Dayton served about five years in prison after being convicted of second-degree assault for assaulting his wife when he came home drunk in January 2017.
His wife defended him to the courts, saying he's "a good man" and "this is not him nor his normal behavior," records say.
His other felony convictions include second-degree assault and second-degree robbery in 2000 when he and two others beat a man with a ceramic clay pot and milk jug then stole his pager; drug and weapons violations in 2006 after he sold crack cocaine to a sheriff's informant and was found with marijuana, cocaine, Ecstacy, three shotguns and a rifle; and a 2000 conviction for first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm after being pulled over for having a headlight out. Police found a gun on the driver's seat and the "barrel of the gun was sticking out towards the door," records say.
Stacy Dayton said she is devastated for the deputies and their families.
"Please know that they are in our prayers," she said. "I'm heartbroken over everything."
