Suspect in shooting arrested

The suspect in a fight and car chase last weekend, in which a vehicle was riddled with bullets, was arrested Thursday and released Friday.

Dung Ngoc Quoc Le, 23, was being held on suspicion of four counts of first-degree assault, drive-by shooting and riot when he posted a $100,000 bond and was released from jail.

According to court documents, Le was driving a 2003 Lincoln Navigator from which five bullets were pumped into the back of a car carrying a man who had just bested one of Le’s friends in a fight.

The Spokane police gang unit is still investigating the incident, which began Oct. 1 on the dance floor of the Trick Shot Dixie Outlaw Saloon and BBQ at 321 W. Sprague Ave.

A police affidavit lays out this sequence:

After attending a wedding, 33-year-old Tracy S. O’Brien and three others piled into 29-year-old Brandy Hein-Jessos’ car and went to Trick Shot Dixie’s. O’Brien and Hein-Jessos were dancing when O’Brien bumped into a man he and his friends described as an “Asian male.”

The man who was bumped flashed gang signs and directed a racial epithet for black people toward O’Brien, who is white. A fight broke out between the two, and bouncers separated them. But the bumped man quickly resumed the fight and struck Hein-Jessos when she intervened.

Bouncers shoved the attacker out the front door and O’Brien out the back door. The attacker and several of his friends ran to the back door, and the fight was on again. Bouncers broke it up again, and the fighters moved across the street.

Police said O’Brien, who called himself an “ultimate fighting champion,” got an “arm bar hold” on his opponent, which either broke the man’s arm or dislocated it. At that point, the loser directed his friends to jump in, and the five of them kicked and stomped O’Brien until Hein-Jessos got in her car and threatened to run them down.

O’Brien and his friends, except for one woman who’d had enough and caught a taxi, fled in Hein-Jessos’ car. The other group followed.

Fearing gunfire, Hein-Jessos told police she took several turns and ran stop signs and traffic lights. As she turned onto Washington Street from Fifth Avenue, near Lewis and Clark High School, a hail of bullets riddled the back of her car without injuring anyone.

Hein-Jessos headed downtown in hopes of spotting a police officer.

Detectives Jeff Harvey and Dean Sprague heard the shots from The Onion, 302 W. Riverside Ave., where they were on bicycle patrol. They pedaled to Trick Shot Dixie’s and interviewed one of O’Brien’s friends – whose escape from pursuit isn’t explained in the court documents.

A witness at Trick Shot Dixie’s said she took down the pursuers’ license number when one of them shouted something like, “This is why you shouldn’t mess with us. We have guns and kill people for stuff like this.”

Police traced the license to Le and arrested him Thursday morning in a 2000 BMW, which they said had “an overwhelming odor of marijuana.”

A small amount of the drug was found under the driver’s seat.