Girlfriend’s 911 call leads to gunfire

RATHDRUM, Idaho – Kara Jones and some of her tightest, best girlfriends sat cross-legged on the street in front of her house at midday Friday, sharing cigarettes, hugs and tears.

They were trying to come to terms with the screaming and gunfire that erupted on this quiet street 12 hours earlier when police shot and killed a man who rushed at officers with a knife and shouted he had a dream he was going to die that night. Jones said the man stabbed himself in the stomach before running at police.

The man, 33-year-old Frank Saucedo Jr., had been Kara Jones’ boyfriend until Thursday.

Jones was working through a double shock Friday afternoon. First, she said, the shock of realizing that Saucedo’s increasingly erratic, controlling and violent behavior fit a classic pattern of an abusive partner. Then the shock of his sudden death hours after she demanded he leave her house. It was a death she suspects he wanted.

Saucedo was shot by a Kootenai County sheriff’s deputy after attempts to bring down the advancing Oregon man with beanbag rounds fired from a shotgun had failed, said Capt. Clark Rollins of the Idaho State Police. Witnesses reported hearing four shots. Rollins said that the beanbag rounds were fired “more than once” and that after they failed to slow Saucedo, “multiple shots were fired.”

ISP is investigating the shooting, which involved officers from Rathdrum police and the Sheriff’s Department. By late morning Friday, ISP investigators had combed the scene of the shooting for evidence, interviewed officers and witnesses and scheduled an autopsy on Saucedo at noon Friday, Rollins said.

The deputy who fired the fatal shot was automatically placed on administrative leave, Sheriff Rocky Watson said. The deputy’s identity was not released by ISP or the sheriff. Counseling or time off will be offered to the other deputy involved during the department’s official debriefing, which may begin as early as today, Watson said.

“Any time somebody dies in a situation like this, it is a tragedy across the board,” Rollins said. “You have a death, and you have officers who have to live with being forced to do what they did.”

Accounts by police and Jones are similar. A distraught Saucedo showed up at Jones’ house on Heritage Road at 1 a.m., holding a kitchen-type knife and demanding to be let in, they said.

The wiry, freckled Jones is raising a son on her own, fixes her own car and mows her own lawn. She met Saucedo early this year. He had just been released from the county jail after serving time for a DUI, Jones said.

They dated briefly, and he seemed like a “perfect gentleman,” she said. “I was not allowed to open any doors. I was not allowed to carry in the groceries. I was not allowed to mow my lawn.

“At first it was kind of nice. He came across as an old-fashioned guy,” she said.

Saucedo briefly lived with Jones and her son, but he left in early spring for a job on a fishing boat in the waters off Alaska. Saucedo returned two weeks ago either because his father had died in Oregon or because he was fired. Jones said she didn’t know which story to believe. Her sense of what she knew about Saucedo was still evolving, she said.

“He hid a lot” from her, Jones said.

After his return, Saucedo became more controlling, Jones said, and jealous of ex-boyfriends who remained in contact with her. “He tried to get me to quit my job. Every time I left the house he would go through my stuff,” Jones said, and then he would accuse her of hiding things or seeing other men. Saucedo became physically violent toward her, she said. Then he would be remorseful and once more a terrific guy.

“He was getting abusive. I kicked him out,” Jones said. She demanded Saucedo have his stuff moved out by 7 p.m. Thursday. Saucedo’s erratic behavior was enough of a concern that Jones placed her son at a different house, and she spent all day with a close friend, Cherie Moore.

Saucedo called her house dozens of times Thursday, Moore said, alternating between rage and cheeriness on the phone, she said. “He was psycho.”

By midnight, Jones figured it was safe to go home to her duplex east of the high school. She was in her duplex alone when Saucedo showed up an hour later.

He was pounding on the door, demanding to be let in, she said. Instead, “I called 911.”

Lt. Alex Carrington, of the Rathdrum city police, said two officers responded to a call of an unwanted visitor shortly after 1 a.m. They found an agitated man with a knife outside the house.

Brandie Rouse, who lives in the other half of the duplex, said she was awakened by Saucedo’s shouting “crazy stuff like ‘Lucifer is inside of me.’ “

Rouse said the Rathdrum officers did not confront Saucedo and even backed away as he “held the knife to his own throat.”

The officers backed their patrol car down the street and called for backup units from the county. Two deputies arrived in separate patrol cruisers within four minutes, police said.

One of the deputies is a member of the SWAT team and carried a shotgun loaded with nonlethal beanbag rounds in his car. Carrington and a shift sergeant with the Sheriff’s Department authorized the use of the beanbag rounds, police said.

Details differ on what happened next, but everybody says it happened fast.

A sergeant at sheriff’s headquarters in Coeur d’Alene, hearing deputies request a shield at the scene, didn’t even make it down the basement steps to retrieve one before he heard the radio call that shots were fired, Sheriff Watson said.

“When you deploy less-than-lethal rounds and they don’t work, your options get pretty limited pretty quick,” Rathdrum’s Carrington said. “The distance between the individual and the officers was closing fast.”

Jones said she saw Saucedo “take off at a dead-bolt run” toward police, who had assembled several hundred feet away.

But he was soon hidden from her sight by a boat parked along the street.

Rouse, who followed Saucedo’s movements from a different vantage point, said that during the time she was able to track his movements Saucedo was walking toward the officers. She could not see the police, she said, and Saucedo was also out of her line of vision before shots were fired.

ISP’s Rollins did not say how close Saucedo came to police or how many of the four officers on the scene discharged their weapons.

Rollins and Watson said that as one deputy used the pump-action shotgun containing the beanbag rounds, the second deputy stood nearby with a rifle as his safeguard.