3 deaths called murder-suicide

PULLMAN – The shooting deaths of three people at a condominium complex here appeared to be a double murder-suicide, Pullman police said Sunday.

Louissa A. Thompson, 27; Peter A. Zornes, 25, of Oakesdale, Wash.; and Trevor S. Saunders, 29, of Moscow, were found dead inside Thompson’s unit at the Statesman Condominiums, 1220 NE State St., on Saturday night.

Detectives said Sunday they recovered a semi-automatic pistol from the unit and believed the shooter is one of the people found dead.

Police were summoned to the complex about 7 p.m. Saturday when one of the people killed didn’t show up for work at a Pullman store. They entered through a back sliding door left open and found the three bodies. Police did not give a motive for the shootings.

The exact cause of death won’t be known until autopsies are completed in the next several days.

Stan Cox, the manager of the condominium complex, said Thompson moved into the ground-floor unit in August and had two small children. He did not think the children were home at the time of the killings. He did not know the two men.

Cox said residents at the complex are mostly retired people and graduate students and faculty at Washington State University. He did not know if Thompson was a WSU student.

“It’s a pretty quiet place,” Cox said.

The condominium complex was also the site of the town’s last homicide in 1996, when Dorothy Martin, 89, was asphyxiated during a burglary.

The keys from the manager’s apartment were stolen to gain access to Martin’s unit.

“I found her,” Cox said. “I came awful close to doing the same thing yesterday.”

Cox said he heard loud noises, but not gunshots, coming from Thompson’s unit Saturday and knocked on the door, but no one answered. He did not know what time that was.

“We didn’t hear any shots. We didn’t see anything until we woke up and opened the curtains and saw the yellow police tape,” said Carol Bagby, a condominium resident.

Carol and her husband, Carroll, moved into the complex three months ago.

Their ground-floor unit has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the condominium’s courtyard and is adjacent to Thompson’s unit.

The Bagbys watched as detectives and forensics specialists with the Washington State Patrol crime lab came and went all day Sunday.

“This is really a quiet part of town,” Carroll Bagby said. “We moved here from Tacoma to get away from this kind of (violence).”