Spokane County homicides down significantly in 2025

Of the 11 homicides in Spokane city limits last year, the first one of 2025 hit Spokane Police Lt. Nate Spiering the hardest.

A 13-year-old boy was sitting on a bed playing video games in the wee hours of Jan. 25 inside a northeast Spokane home when gunshots rang out. One of the bullets coming from outside the home struck Peperzak Middle School student Gavin Looper in the head.

Prosecutors have accused Glen D. Burkey, 26, of firing into the home with the intention of shooting a man inside but instead killed Gavin.

“That was absolutely brutal,” Spiering said last month.

As a father, Spiering said he can’t imagine what Gavin’s parents went through.

“That just breaks my heart,” he said.

At a news conference days after the shooting, police Chief Kevin Hall used the fatal shooting as a rallying cry to tackle gun violence across the city, with a goal of reducing violent gun crime by 10% by December 2026.

Hall has said lowering gun violence is his top priority.

“The community should be outraged,” Hall said at the conference. “Our children are dying at the hands of gun violence.”

The 11 homicides in the city mark a sharp decline from recent years. The number of homicides each year in the entirety of Spokane County had largely stayed the same until 2025.

Sixteen homicides – 11 in the city and five in the county – were recorded last year, according to data provided by Spokane police, Spokane County Sheriff’s Office and Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Five of the 16 were deemed self-defense, including four in the city of Spokane, which Spiering said was high, given that is more than one-third of all the city homicides.

There were 27 homicides in 2024 countywide, including 20 in Spokane and seven outside Spokane city limits, 25 homicides in 2023, 29 in 2022 and 24 in 2021, according to previous Spokesman-Review reporting.

The Spokesman-Review originally reported 25 homicides in 2024, including 18 in the city, because it chose not to record a November 2024 infant death in the 1800 block of West Ninth Avenue. The medical examiner’s office had not determined at the time the cause and manner of death of 25-day-old Braedon Schatz and police had not charged anyone.

The medical examiner’s office has since ruled that Schatz died from the toxic effects of methamphetamine and blunt-force head injuries. It ruled the death a homicide. Police have yet to arrest anyone.

Shortly after Schatz’s death, police issued a news release seeking the public’s help in locating 38-year-old Amber Lee Rae Zeober, a person of interest in the death investigation. She turned herself into law enforcement shortly after and was held in the Spokane County Jail on a fugitive charge for alleged probation violations.

The second homicide victim added to the 2024 count was 73-year-old Patrick Monahan, who died in February 2025 from complications of remote blunt-force trauma of the head, according to the medical examiner’s office.

Monahan sustained the injuries after a neighbor pushed him to the ground during a July 2024 encounter on the South Hill, according to past Spokesman-Review reporting. The neighbor, Brennan Schreibman, a lawyer and the vice chair of the Spokane Human Rights Commission, has not been charged.

Spiering, who supervises police’s Major Crimes, Special Victims and Domestic Violence units, said he couldn’t put his finger on why city homicides were nearly cut in half from 2024 to 2025 because of the several factors that could have influenced the drop.

“I’m not even going to give you an opinion as to why,” he said. “I can tell you that what you’ve got, you’ve got a department full of folks that are dedicated to public safety, and to see homicides go down, makes me super happy.”

He said the decrease in homicide cases allows detectives to investigate other cases they might not have gotten to in a year with a high homicide caseload, like 2024.

Of the 16 Spokane County homicides last year, 14 involved firearms, and the other two involved edged weapons.

None of the homicides appeared to be related to domestic violence. However, Spokane Valley police are still investigating the death of Steven Elrod, who was found dead in a motorhome in May with a gunshot wound. No one has been arrested.

In 2024, at least nine of the 27 Spokane homicides were domestic-violence related.

The other 15 homicide cases in 2025 were solved.

Since 2021, Spokane police have eight unsolved homicides, Spiering said. Detectives are further along in some of those cases than others, and Spiering emphasized those cases have to be “solid” when they arrive on a prosecutor’s desk.

“Something that impresses me with the work that’s being done around here is how dedicated (detectives) are to providing a case that is ready for prosecution and doesn’t leave any open doors,” he said.