Several killed on duty in region’s recent memory

The tense shootout that hospitalized two sheriff’s deputies Tuesday was eerily similar to a 1991 incident that also began with a traffic stop and involved a high-speed chase throughout northern Spokane County.

That previous incident ended with four law enforcement officers wounded after a shooting spree and two civilians dead. Three men were involved in the chase, two of whom had taken part in an earlier bank robbery; all four police officers survived.

At least 10 serious shootings, including several fatalities, of law enforcement officers have unfolded throughout the Inland Northwest over the past 30 years, according to Spokesman-Review archives.

Spokane police Detective Brian Orchard was shot in the head in July 1983 during a stakeout and died of his injuries a short time later. He was the first police officer killed in the line of duty in 54 years, the newspaper reported.

The most recent fatal shooting of an officer in the area happened in May 2007, when Lee Stewart Newbill, with the Moscow Police, was shot in a planned attack on law enforcement. The suspect fired shots at the emergency dispatch center inside the Latah County Courthouse.

Newbill died after he ran into the courthouse to respond to the shooting.

One of the most brutal incidents happened in June 1998, when Idaho State Trooper Linda Huff was fatally shot in the parking lot behind state police headquarters in Coeur d’Alene. Huff took 17 shots from the assailant, the last one of which was inflicted after she had already been paralyzed by a shot to the spine.

Colville Confederated Tribes Police Sgt. Louis Millard was fatally shot during an arrest of Elmer McGinnis in Nespelem, Wash., in August 1986. The shooter wounded a number of other officers during the gunbattle.

U.S. Forest Service Ranger Brent Jacobson was killed in a backwoods shootout with two robbery suspects west of Dover, Idaho, in January 1989. Dale Robertson, the agency’s chief at the time, told a reporter shortly after that the killing marked the first time in his memory and possibly the history of the Forest Service that one of the agency’s law enforcement officers had been shot and killed.

Federal Marshal William Degan died in August 1992 when he suffered a gunshot wound from a sniper in a standoff at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. Two other marshals were pinned down for almost 12 hours by sniper fire before the Idaho Department of Law Enforcement crisis response team managed to rescue them.