PORT ANGELES – As the year 2019 comes to an end, Clallam County Prosecutor Mark Nichols joined the Todd Ortloff Show to take a look at the year in review from his perspective and, unfortunately, had to share some grim statistics.
Nichols says this has been one of the deadliest years on record in terms of homicides in the county, and it began with the discovery of the bodies of Darrell and Jordan Iverson and Tiffany May on Bear Meadow Road on New Year’s Eve.
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“Most say they believe that the triple homicide that we experienced at the start of the year was the county’s first. Another first was that we had an arson quadruple homicide later on this calendar year. And another first involves that, calendar year to date, we’ve had 10 homicides in Clallam County. So double-digit numbers, which is something not only we that we have not seen before but frankly we should not be seeing.”
Nichols says a county of our size would normally average about 3 homicides per year.
Other homicides in 2019 included Valerie Claplanhoo in her Sequim apartment, and the arson quadruple homicide that took the lives of Valerie, Lilly, Emma and Jayden Kambeitz. Those were followed by the vehicular homicide of Lou Galgano on Highway 101, and the shooting death of Tristen Pasani in Forks.
Separate from the homicides, Nichols says the number of violent crimes that his office is prosecuting have almost doubled in the last 5 years.
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“If it were one or two years in a vacuum and then things started to reverse I’d be comfortable in saying, you know, ‘I don’t see any perceptible real trend’. But given that the numbers are by and large increasing almost year over year for the last five years, as we’ve been tracking this, we are starting to see what I would define and identify as a trend of increased violence in Clallam County. At the same time, 2019 is also been a remarkable year with respect to felony drug and property crime because we’re on pace to meet or exceed the number of cases charged in each of those crime categories this year as well.”
Nichols points out that statewide and nationally these kinds of crimes are trending downward. Why does Clallam County appear to be moving in the wrong direction lately? For now, there are no easy answers.