Local News: Thursday, June 01, 2000

Two teens shot to death after organized fistfight

by Diane Brooks, Keiko Morris and Manny Gonzales

Seattle Times Snohomish County bureau

EVERETT - The girls loved Jesse Stoner. Funny and cute, he had a contagious laugh that could change even the bleakest of moods. He was an artist too. In a self-portrait on his bedroom wall, he's rapping with style into a big silver microphone.

Jason Thompson - J.T. to his friends - was the big kid with freckles who once wore jersey No. 72 on the Mariner High School football team. Everyone knew when Thompson showed up at school rallies: He was the loudest one there.

The two 18-year-olds were together as usual Tuesday night, riding along with friends to watch a fight at a South Everett house. Ten minutes later, they were dead.

Although no arrests have been made yet, Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart said investigators yesterday confiscated more than 20 guns from the home where somebody sprayed bullets into the men's car. He declined to discuss the root of the fight but hinted that it had racial overtones.

"For this to happen the way it happened, it's stupid. Absolutely stupid," Bart said. "It makes no sense at all."

The men's buddy Chris Gulsvig was driving that night. Stoner and Thompson were riding in the back seat of his 1985 Honda Accord, a recent gift from Gulsvig's father. Between them sat Thompson's girlfriend, Tyffannie Trunnell; in the front passenger seat rode a teenage boy whose name wasn't released.

A fight had been arranged between two other teenagers, Gulsvig said. They'd had a previous conflict, but Gulsvig did not say what it was about.

He said his carload was along to support one of the fighters, who is African American. When the other youth - who is white - didn't show up, they called him at home. The fight then moved to that youth's house in the 2000 block of 106th Street Southwest.

In all, three carloads of teenagers arrived at the house to support their friend. The rooting gallery for the other teen included about 10 middle-aged men, including the youth's father, Gulsvig said. They were walking around holding their hands behind their backs, concealing them. And some made racist remarks, he said.

"At one point, (the teen's father) said if anybody jumped in they would start blasting," he said. Neither the father nor the son could be reached for comment yesterday.

The youth who lived at the house won the fistfight, which lasted about 10 minutes. But as the visitors began to leave, gunfire broke out about 8 p.m. Gulsvig and his friends were in the last car out.

He didn't realize his friends had been shot until he looked in his rearview mirror and saw Stoner, who had been hit in the head.

Gulsvig raced to a nearby strip mall at Everett Mall Way and Evergreen Way, leapt from his car while it was still rolling and called 911 from a pay phone in front of a Cost Cutter Foods store.

It was too late.

Yesterday Gulsvig seemed numb as he told his story.

"They were like the funniest people," he said of Stoner and Thompson. "They were the type of people where you could be in the worst mood, mad at the world, and they'd turn your frown upside down."

Gulsvig was in their rap band, the Unseen Mob.

"For white boys, they loved to rap," said Toni Rosen, a junior at Mariner High School. "They'd just get a beat flowing. And then they'd just go. They just loved to rap and flow."

Stoner was an only child. Monday was to be his 19th birthday. He had left Mariner earlier this year but was pursuing a General Educational Development diploma.

"He was a cutie. A definite cutie," said his mother, Donna Stoner. "He'd do just about anything for anybody. I know a lot of parents say that, but this one is a special one."

Jesse Stoner played the part of the clown, she said. And, he could do a terrific imitation of the velociraptors from the movie "Jurassic Park." He had no enemies, she said.

The last time Donna Stoner saw her son was Tuesday morning, when she woke him up before she left to run errands.

"I said, `I love you, goodbye.' He said, `I love you too. Goodbye.' "

Friends, classmates and school officials did what they could to make sense of the deaths. For hours yesterday, a continuous flow of students from Mariner High School and ACES Alternative High School made their way to a makeshift memorial display in the parking lot of Cost Cutter Foods.

They carried bouquets of flowers and balloons. They stood in a quiet circle, many of them red-eyed, some of them absently puffing cigarettes. They signed a yearbook and a football jersey bearing Thompson's old number, 72. Friends hope the school will retire that number when they place the jersey in his coffin.

Thompson would have graduated next week from ACES.

"Just because of a stupid, little fight," said Summer Cottrell, a sophomore at ACES. "It makes me so mad."

Rosen and other Mariner students said they heard rumors Tuesday that someone was going to get shot, but she didn't know about any prearranged fight. Rosen didn't take the rumor seriously. When there was a bomb threat last year, nothing happened. Nothing ever did, she said.

"I always thought it would never happen," Rosen said. "And then it hits you."

Classmates at ACES knew that Thompson was crazy about football, basketball and his girlfriend, Trunnell, who survived the hail of bullets Tuesday night. At least six bullets hit the car.

The Snohomish County Medical Examiner's Office said the two victims died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head and upper body.

Thompson and Trunnell were a happy couple. He seemed to care deeply about her, said Tiffany Kelsey, a sophomore at ACES. He cared deeply about all his friends, she said.

At one point, the Thompson family paid a brief visit to the memorial. They stood at a distance watching.

"This violence has got to stop, in memory of him," said his father, Sonny Thompson.

At Mariner High School, administrators and staff members met early yesterday morning to talk about the tragedy and ways to help students cope with the news. Some teachers sidelined regular lesson plans to let the students talk about their anxieties and violence.

Administrators canceled after-school activities and closed the building at 3:30 p.m. - a precaution against any sort of retaliation for the shootings.

Principal Tracy Van Winkle said her first reaction was sadness and a mass of emotions at the senselessness of the shootings.

Society has changed since she graduated from high school, Van Winkle noted, but she's not so sure how much the students she sees everyday have changed.

"For kids to get into a knock out, drag out fight is not uncommon," Van Winkle said. "There are all those pieces of teenager-hood that, no matter how hard we try, they're not going to change until they make that decision for themselves. We can just hope and pray that they're safe."

South Everett resident Debbie Menehan brought her 6-year-old son, Marshal, to the memorial in the Cost Cutter parking lot, in part to teach him a lesson about guns and violence.

The child made his way through the teenagers to add his bouquet of daisies and pink carnations to the other flowers on the pavement.

"We drove by earlier and said a prayer, then came back," Menehan said. "We're sorry. And he (Marshal) also needs to learn you don't fight. This is what it possibly leads to."

Tom Myhre, a science teacher and Mariner's varsity football coach, taught Thompson and Stoner, first at Voyager Middle School and later at Mariner. And he had coached Thompson, who quit football after he hurt his foot midseason in his sophomore year.

"He was a happy-go-lucky kid," Myhre said. "He worked hard at school."

Thompson initially didn't have an interest in science, but made progress in his class. As a sophomore, Thompson was Myrhe's teaching assistant. Thompson and Stoner had kept in touch with Myhre.

"Jesse was excited about the future," Myhre said. "Things were going in the right direction."