Caleb Tipton, grandson of the late jazz singer Billy Tipton, suffered sudden, violent end to a complicated life

Like the dozens of snapshots hanging from a large picture frame on their dining room wall, Roberta and Eric “Sven” Svenonius can see memories of their son Caleb Tipton wherever they look.

In the large stack of board games they walk past each time they enter their apartment. How, even at 28 years old, he loved to sit with his father for hours, fighting mythical creatures and saving townsfolk in Dungeons & Dragons.

“Anytime he was here, we would play,” Sven said. “And he was very funny. Goofy. He messed around. His favorite saying was, ‘Smile, it makes your butt tingle.’”

All of those memories came crashing together June 15, when the Svenoniuses heard a knock at their door. “Your son has been shot,” they said a police chaplain told them matter-of-factly. “He’s currently at Sacred Heart Hospital on life support.”

What they didn’t immediately know was how bad a condition their oldest son was in until they were able to stand at his bedside.

He’d had a hard life up to that point – a father of five with three different mothers, and at best, he had a tenuous relationship with the three children living in Spokane, according to his parents.

He struggled with a heroin addiction from the age of 12 to about two years ago. And he had trouble nailing down a steady job.

He was also the grandson of the late jazz singer Billy Tipton, who in 1989 was found dead in a Spokane mobile home. The discovery made international news when it was revealed to paramedics, and later the world, that Billy was in fact a woman pretending to be a man, deceiving even her past wives and children.

Billy Tipton and her partner Kitty Oakes together had three illegally adopted sons, who were awarded equal shares of Oakes’ $300,000 estate in 2008 in one of the most unusual and landmark probate cases in state history.

One of those sons, William Tipton, had Caleb in 1990 with Roberta, who divorced William around 2005. He had little contact with his biological father after that.

But none of that compared to the night of June 14, when a bullet entered the back of his head just above his left ear, exiting around his right temple. Doctors explained from the beginning that it was an unsurvivable brain injury, his family said. And Tipton was placed on life support to preserve the organs that could go on to serve others, including his heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

“He would have really loved that,” Sven said.

“He was very much a giving individual,” Roberta said. “He would chop off his right arm to help a friend. As I understand it, that’s how he wound up in this mess in the first place. He was helping recover stuff from a friend.”

According to police, Tipton and three friends drove to a home in the 2500 block of East Rowan Avenue in Hillyard at Tipton’s request. He believed a resident had stolen items from one of his friends.

When they arrived just after midnight, the friends stayed back while Tipton confronted a woman named Brittany Korzonthowski, who came out of the house and stood on the front porch. The friends described seeing the two yelling at each other, and then, with their view partially blocked by a van, Tipton raised his arms as if he was hitting her while she yelled at him to stop, according to police.

They then said they saw Korzonthowski go back inside while Tipton started walking away to the east. As he was walking, they saw the screen door open and moments later heard a gunshot. They saw their friend down on the sidewalk a house away, bleeding from a wound in his head.

A witness inside the house told police Tipton hit Korzonthowski in the head with a “sap” – in this case, a rock tied to a string – at least “four times and about seven times elsewhere on her body.” And when Korzonthowski produced a pistol, she told officers Tipton ran away and Korzonthowski chased, eventually shooting him because he kept turning back towards her, sap in hand.

Korzonthowski said it was all an accident, according to court records. She said Tipton told her he was going to kill her and her children. And she remembered getting hit in the head with a weapon, but when she cocked and raised the gun, she didn’t know it was loaded. She told police she only wanted to scare Tipton, not kill him.

While it’s been just a week since his death, it is the description of his actions that night that has caused his family the most restless evenings.

Roberta said the man she knew would never hit anyone, no matter the circumstances – and his nearly clean criminal record would support that, save for a felony drug charge in 2016 that jump-started his desire to be clean. Even in the wildest throes of addiction, Roberta said, he was never physical with the mother of his children.

“He’s never, ever hit a woman,” she said. “He would never ever threaten anyone else’s children. He loved kids.”

Tipton’s aunt, Rebecca Phillips, who lived with him and his mother for many years when he was a child, said she felt sorry for Korzonthowski, who has been charged with first-degree murder, and her children, who are without their mother while she sits in jail in lieu of a $500,000 bond. But she feels even worse for her nephew’s kids, knowing they’ll never have a chance to really know their father.

“I just can’t imagine him doing any bodily harm,” she said. “He’s just not like that.”

And similar to the pictures on the wall, memories can be upsetting – such as the photo of him dressed in woman’s clothing, ready to play a prank on his aunt and tell her he was changing genders. At one point, a memory to giggle about when it came up in conversation.

Now, it’s a source of despair and heart ache – just like the dissonance between the Caleb they knew and the aggressor described in police reports.

It’s something Eric and Roberta Svenonius will think and puzzle over every day until their son’s killer is convicted.

“I know this is going to be a long haul,” Roberta said, eyes welling with tears. “It’s going to be like ripping off a bandage to a wound every day.”