Lakewood Four: The Shooting, Clemmons, and the Aftermath

The Lakewood Four shooting was an ambush on November 29, 2009, in which Maurice Clemmons walked into a Forza Coffee Shop near Lakewood, Washington, and shot four police officers to death in about sixty seconds before fleeing. The victims — Sergeant Mark Renninger, Officer Tina Griswold, Officer Ronald Owens, and Officer Greg Richards — were all veterans of the Lakewood Police Department. Clemmons was killed by a Seattle police officer two days later, seven of his associates were prosecuted for helping him before or after the attack, and the case produced $12.5 million in state settlements, new Washington laws, and a national controversy over the Arkansas clemency decision that had freed him years earlier.

What Happened at the Coffee Shop

Shortly after 8:00 a.m. on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the four officers were seated inside the Forza Coffee Shop at 11401 Steele Street South, in an unincorporated area of Pierce County, holding a planning session before their shift. Clemmons, 37, entered the shop, walked toward the officers, and drew a 9mm semiautomatic Glock pistol.¹

He shot Griswold in the back of the head and Renninger in the side of the head, killing both instantly. When his Glock malfunctioned, Owens engaged Clemmons in a physical struggle. Clemmons produced a .38 caliber revolver and shot Owens in the head. Richards then fought Clemmons in a prolonged struggle during which the revolver was expended. Clemmons wrested Richards’ .40 caliber duty weapon from him and shot him in the head as well. The entire confrontation lasted about sixty seconds, and no other customers or employees were harmed.¹

The first 911 call came in at 8:14 a.m. Clemmons, wounded during the struggle, fled in a pickup truck driven by an accomplice, Darcus Allen, who had been waiting at a car wash a quarter mile away.²

The Four Officers Killed

All four were veteran officers with eight to fourteen years of law enforcement experience, each a member of the Lakewood Police Department since its founding in 2004 and the first in that agency ever killed in the line of duty. Officer Griswold was the first female officer in the United States killed in the line of duty that year.³

Sergeant Mark Renninger, 39, grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1989, and served in the 75th Ranger Regiment and the 2nd Ranger Battalion before an honorable discharge in 1996. He spent eight years with the Tukwila Police Department, where he became a SWAT officer and police guild president, then transferred to Lakewood in 2004 and was promoted to patrol sergeant in 2008. He was survived by his wife Kim, daughters Letra and Allison, and son Nicholas.⁴

Officer Greg Richards, 42, had eight years of total law enforcement service, five of them with Lakewood, and was survived by his wife and three children.⁵ Officer Tina Griswold was 40 and Officer Ronald Owens was 37. All four left behind children and families.³

Who Maurice Clemmons Was

Clemmons had a long and violent criminal record spanning two states. At 17, he was sentenced to 108 years in an Arkansas prison for a spree of robberies, burglaries, and possession of a firearm at a school.⁶ In May 2000, after eleven years of incarceration, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence to 47 years, making him immediately eligible for parole. The Arkansas Post Prison Transfer Board had unanimously recommended the commutation, and Huckabee later cited Clemmons’s youth at sentencing.⁷

In 2001, Clemmons committed an armed robbery in Camden, Arkansas, was sentenced to ten years, and returned to prison. He was paroled in March 2004 and relocated to the Seattle area.⁶⁸

In Washington he was suspected of armed robberies and drug smuggling. In May 2009 he was charged with seven felony counts of assault and malicious mischief after an altercation with Pierce County sheriff’s deputies, and in July 2009 he was arrested on a second-degree child rape charge involving a 12-year-old relative. The new charges violated his Arkansas parole, and he was held as a fugitive.⁶

Then came a sequence of bureaucratic failures. Arkansas corrections officials issued a “no bail” fugitive warrant, then rescinded it, which allowed Washington to drop its fugitive charge in July 2009. A second Arkansas warrant was issued in October 2009, but it was never entered into the National Crime Information Center database, and Pierce County Superior Court had no record of it. With the hold gone, Clemmons used his family home as collateral to post $190,000 bail. He walked out of the Pierce County Jail on November 23, 2009, six days before the massacre.⁹⁶

The Manhunt and Clemmons’s Death

Clemmons was bleeding when he left the coffee shop; witnesses reported one of the officers had shot him during the struggle. A twelve-hour police siege of a home in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood on the evening of November 29 came up empty, and authorities said Clemmons had slipped out of the area.¹⁰

Early on December 1, about 40 hours after the shooting, Seattle Police Officer Benjamin Kelly was patrolling alone in South Seattle when he stopped to investigate an abandoned, running vehicle that matched the description of a car stolen the night before. As he radioed in, Kelly spotted a hooded man approaching his cruiser from behind. He exited the car, recognized Clemmons by his size and a prominent mole on his cheek, and ordered him to show his hands. When Clemmons reached toward his waist instead, Kelly fired seven shots. Clemmons stumbled to a nearby hedge and collapsed. In his pocket, officers found a Glock .40 caliber pistol: the duty weapon taken from Officer Greg Richards.¹¹¹²

The Accomplices Known as the Clemmons Seven

Seven people were prosecuted for helping Clemmons before and after the shooting. Their cases took more than a decade to resolve, and several of the convictions did not hold.

Darcus Allen

Allen faced the most serious charges as the alleged getaway driver. Prosecutors said he drove Clemmons to and from the coffee shop, waited at a nearby car wash, and later deleted calls and texts on a burner phone. They also presented evidence that Allen attended a dinner days before the shooting at which Clemmons threatened to kill police officers.²

In 2011, a jury convicted Allen of four counts of premeditated first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to 420 years in prison: 100 years per officer plus 20 years for firearm use, served consecutively. In January 2015, the Washington State Supreme Court overturned the conviction, finding the prosecutor had committed “prejudicial misconduct” by repeatedly misstating the legal definition of “knowledge.” The prosecution had argued Allen “should have known” Clemmons planned to kill, while the law required proof that he “actually knew.”¹³

Two retrials followed, one ending in a hung jury in November 2022 and another also ending in a mistrial.¹⁴ In April 2023, Allen, then 51, entered an Alford plea to one count of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, which carries a maximum penalty of ten years. Under an Alford plea, a defendant maintains innocence but acknowledges the prosecution likely has enough evidence to convict. Having already spent more than thirteen years in custody, Allen was credited with time served and released from King County Jail the night of his plea.²

The Other Six

Five associates — Letrecia Nelson (Clemmons’s aunt), Quiana Williams, Douglas Davis, Eddie Lee Davis, and LaTanya Clemmons — were convicted in 2011 on charges of rendering criminal assistance and unlawful possession of firearms, with sentences of five to ten years.¹⁵

Several of those convictions were later undone. In 2013, the Washington Court of Appeals overturned Douglas Davis’s gun possession conviction. On December 24, 2014, the state Supreme Court reversed the convictions and exceptional sentences of Letrecia Nelson and Eddie Lee Davis. In a 5-to-4 ruling, the majority found that the two had at most “passing control” of the stolen weapon and that their enhanced sentences were not legally justified. Eddie Davis, originally sentenced to more than ten years, became eligible for release under a recalculated range of 41 to 54 months. Nelson had already been released under an early-release program before the ruling.¹³¹⁶

The Huckabee Clemency Controversy

The shooting immediately reopened scrutiny of Mike Huckabee’s record as governor of Arkansas. During his ten and a half years in office, Huckabee granted 1,033 pardons and commutations, which critics said was more than twice the number issued by his three predecessors over the previous seventeen years combined.¹⁷

Huckabee said he accepted “full responsibility” for the 2000 decision but maintained he had acted on the information available at the time, noting that the trial judge had weighed in favorably and that he had denied 92 percent of the clemency requests he received. He argued that Clemmons had later returned to prison on new Arkansas charges, and that Arkansas prosecutors dropped those charges and allowed his release.⁷

Larry Jegley, the Arkansas prosecutor who originally secured Clemmons’s conviction, said Huckabee had exercised clemency at an “astounding” and “wholesale rate,” citing a survey showing Huckabee issued more clemencies between 1996 and 2004 than the governors of six surrounding states. Jegley’s office also said it was never notified of the commutation request, though he allowed that could have been a bureaucratic failure.⁷

The controversy was compounded by the earlier case of Wayne Dumond, a convicted rapist whose parole Huckabee had supported in 1996; Dumond was released in 1999 and later raped and murdered a Missouri woman.¹⁷ Huckabee’s initial public statement after the Lakewood shooting attributed the tragedy to “a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state.” The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department called the remark an attempt to deflect blame.⁷

Lawsuits and Legislative Changes

The officers’ families sued the Washington State Department of Corrections, alleging the agency had mishandled Clemmons’s supervision and failed to act on the October 2009 Arkansas arrest warrant. According to the families, a community corrections officer noted the warrant in the DOC’s internal system but never notified the Pierce County Jail or prosecutors, allowing Clemmons to make bail.¹⁸

By September 2012, Pierce County Superior Court Judge Frank Cuthbertson approved settlements totaling $12.5 million. The families of Renninger and Richards each received $5 million. Griswold’s family received $2.5 million, split between her son and her estate and daughter.¹⁸

In April 2010, Washington Governor Chris Gregoire signed several laws prompted by the case. Survivor payments for families of officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty rose from $150,000 to $214,000, with future inflation adjustments. Children of slain officers were granted tuition-free education at state colleges. A prior requirement of ten years of service to guarantee lifetime benefits for surviving families was removed. The “McKissack Bill” ensured that officers permanently disabled in the line of duty would keep their health benefits.¹⁹

On the criminal justice side, legislators increased penalties for anyone who renders assistance to a wanted murderer and passed a measure allowing officials to revoke the parole or probation of offenders originally from other states who reside in Washington, a direct response to the interstate supervision failures in the Clemmons case.¹⁹

How the Officers Are Remembered

A joint memorial service was held on December 8, 2009, at the Tacoma Dome. Nearly 20,000 people attended, preceded by a procession of roughly 2,000 law enforcement vehicles. Officers came from across Washington, the rest of the United States, and Canada, and the service was broadcast on network television and streamed online.²⁰

On the first anniversary, a black granite monument was dedicated outside the Lakewood Police Department. It bears the officers’ names, the date of their deaths, an etched image of a kneeling officer, and the Latin inscription Praecessi in vulnero via (“We go in harm’s way”).²¹

The Forza Coffee Shop was converted in May 2012 into an independently owned business called Blue Steele Coffee Company. The new owners, the Marshall family, installed a large blue steel monument featuring the names and images of the four officers outside the shop, run a “Cups for Cops” donation program, and host an annual gathering on the anniversary of the shooting.²²²³

The Lakewood Police Department and the Emergency Food Network have co-hosted the Fallen Officer Food and Blood Drive every year since 2010, timed to the November 29 anniversary. By the 15th annual drive in December 2024, the effort had provided over 720,000 meals to families and individuals in Pierce County.²⁴

1
POAM. Surprise Attack on Lakewood Officers
2
Seattle Times. Man Accused of Being Getaway Driver in Lakewood Officers’ Slayings Set Free
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NLEOMF. Another Multiple-Fatality Tragedy
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The Morning Call. Mark Renninger
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Behind the Badge Foundation. Officer Gregory J. Richards
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Seattle Times. A Path to Murder: The Story of Maurice Clemmons
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CNN. Huckabee Faces Questions Over Clemmons Clemency
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Christian Science Monitor. Maurice Clemmons and a Trail of Missed Chances
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Seattle Times. Warrant Failures in Clemmons Case
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CNN. Washington Police Shooting
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NLEOMF. Officer of the Month, March 2010
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Police One. Seattle Officer Talks About Shooting Cop Killer
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KOMO News. Court Tosses Conviction of Lakewood Cop Killer’s Accomplice
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The News Tribune. Mistrial Declared in Darcus Allen Case
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Pierce County. Clemmons Accomplice Convictions
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Washington Courts. Justices Overturn Sentences in 2009 Lakewood Police Killings
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ABC News. Huckabee Clemency Freed Maurice Clemmons
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Seattle Times. State Agrees to Pay $5 Million Each to Families of Two Slain Lakewood Officers
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Police One. Wash. Governor Signs Police Benefits Laws in Wake of Fatal Shootings
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Police Magazine. Lakewood Memorial Honors Fallen Heroes
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Seattle Times. Lakewood Marks Year Anniversary of 4 Officers’ Deaths
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Patch. Forza Where Lakewood Officers Were Shot to Become Blue Steele
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PLU. BlueSteele Coffee
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Emergency Food Network. Fallen Officer’s Food Drive and Blood Drive