Three teens arrested for involvement in fatal shooting of 22-year-old woman
Jun 5, 2024, 1:30 PM | Updated: Jun 6, 2024, 6:31 am
Dianna Stone, 22. (Photos courtesy of Mike Stone via the National Gun Violence Memorial)
(Photos courtesy of Mike Stone via the National Gun Violence Memorial)
Puyallup Police have arrested three suspects in connection to the February murder of 22-year-old Gianna Stone.
Police stated the suspects — two males aged 17 and 18 from Federal Way, along with an 18-year-old male from Puyallup — allegedly attempted to rob Stone before shooting her in the head.
“While it was initially believed that the incident involved a confrontation between the suspects and victims, detectives determined that this incident was random and began as an attempted robbery,” Puyallup Police Department’s communications team said in a news release.
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Detectives pieced together crucial information after the suspects were involved in a car crash later in the day.
“Information that led detectives to look at the three suspects stemmed from a patrol officer recognizing a vehicle at the scene of a serious injury collision that occurred after the homicide,” the news release continued.
The driver reportedly fled from a traffic stop and crashed near the Washington State Fair. At the scene of the collision, an officer alerted detectives to the potential link between the vehicle and the homicide as the vehicle that matched the description from the homicide.
The shooting appears to have been random. All three are now behind bars and currently face second-degree murder charges.
Stone was 18 months old when he was adopted out of St. Petersburg, Russia by her parents living in Kingston. She attended Bainbridge High School and Kingston High School, according to The News Tribune. Her last job was at the Kingston Ferry Terminal.
She joined a Bainbridge Island crew team as a coxswain and also rode horses. She even did some rodeo riding at community events with her horse Surrender.
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On the day Stone was shot, she was transported to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, but died less than 15 minutes after police were dispatched to the scene.
Frank Sumrall is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here and you can email him here.
