How Marysville police used ERPO to prevent possible Vegas-style massacre

Marysville Police may have prevented a Vegas-style massacre after initiating their first Extreme Risk Protection Order.

RELATED: Las Vegas shooting sparks gun control debate

Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPO) are Washington state’s version of a red flag law. They allow police or family members to ask courts to temporarily remove someone’s gun rights, even if they haven’t committed a crime when they exhibit certain dangerous behavior.

Investigators say the case in Marysville is exactly how ERPOs are meant to be used.

It all started a few weeks ago when police received a 911 call from a woman saying her husband was acting strangely. She said he was extremely paranoid and possibly having some sort of mental breakdown.

Marysville Police Commander Mark Thomas says that’s when officers went to the home.

“When we arrived on scene we got more information that he thought he was being watched and followed and possibly poisoned by government sources and other individuals and sent her out of the house,” he said. The woman’s husband hadn’t made a threat to his family or his wife at that point. “We were on scene for over an hour trying to contact him. We did see him through the window, we knew that he had an AR-15 assault rifle that he was carrying with him and a gas mask that he was carrying with him.”

After trying to engage the man for more than an hour to get him some help or services, police made the decision to pull out to keep from escalating the situation and let things calm down.

“He didn’t make any threats to harm a family member or anything so there’s no domestic violence situation, he actually asked his wife to leave for her own protection, so we didn’t have a crime. And what we didn’t want to do is force a confrontation and get in a position where we’d have to use force or even deadly force to resolve the situation where we have someone who has not committed a crime and in their house carrying a firearm.”

And that firearm was completely legal. The man has a concealed pistol license and bought the AR-15 legally.

The next day the man’s family called the police again, with new information.

“Basically saying, that he has rented two hotel rooms at the Tulalip Casino Resort, that he has firearms with him and that he is still really paranoid, people following him, very agitated. Those kinds of things.”

Commander Thomas says that raised serious red flags.

“Of course I am thinking Las Vegas and those kinds of incidences. The fact that he has access to lots of weapons — we know for a fact that at least one of them is an assault weapon. His state of mind, his paranoia, you just don’t know what he’s seen, right? I mean, it’s potentially one of those things that if we don’t act then what can we live with after the fact?”

RELATED: Inslee signs bill to ban bump stocks in Washington state

At that point, the man had been talking with his daughter on the phone, telling her he rented hotel rooms. Police began talking with police at Tulalip, but the man was not there and nobody knew where he was. His daughter tracked his phone to help police locate him.

Eventually, they found him at a friend’s house in Seattle.

“They get the address, they set up, and then we dispatched two units down there to hopefully contact him in a safe manner which eventually happens,” Thomas said.

When police arrived, he had a loaded firearm on him. They confiscated the gun and took him into custody. He was involuntarily committed to the hospital for a 72-hour mental health evaluation.

“During that process, the family members give us permission to search the house and we search the house and we find eleven other firearms,” Thomas explained. “Some of them are hidden, secreted around the house. That in and of itself is disconcerting; that he’s staged weapons around the house. So we recovered those weapons, we recovered a weapon that was on him at the time, and there were additional weapons in his truck. We eventually take possession for safekeeping all of the weapons.”

Police were allowed to take those weapons for safe keeping because the family asked them to, but the man had not committed a crime so it was just a temporary fix.

Police used an Extreme Risk Protection Order to ensure he couldn’t get his hands on a gun after he left the hospital.

“It took us a day to put together all of the information and then talking to the family to get updates and things like that and then we produced our affidavit,” Marysville Prosecuting Attorney Jennifer Millett. “Then when we went to our court, our court was very quick with it. We filed it in the morning. We had a hearing at eleven o’clock, and by 11:30 we had the ex parte order to go and serve him and get transferred to superior court.”

Millett says this particular case is exactly what ERPOs are for.

“I can’t think of a better example than the facts that we had in this case in regards to using this law.”

As for whether getting the ERPO prevented a mass shooting, Thomas says, “personally, I’d feel horrible if we could have done something and didn’t do anything if somebody got hurt. It’s hard to say if having done what we’ve done we’ve saved people or saved injury because you just don’t know. He might have come to his senses or the family might have been able to convince him to seek out medical attention and you just don’t know. But when you’re dealing with firearms — large-capacity type firearms — it’s not worth the risk.”

Our state’s ERPOs can be requested by either the police or family members or others living a person who is talking about killing people, suicide, suffering a mental crisis and certain other behaviors.

You do not need a lawyer to file the request with the court.

You can find out more about Extreme Risk Protection Orders and get the forms to file one with the courts here.

Follow @https://twitter.com/HannaKIROFM