5 Years Post-2020: Where We Stand After WA’s 2 Biggest Police Trials

Editor's note: This post was updated to reflect that ex-Auburn officer Jeff Nelson was fired the week following his sentencing this January for murdering Jesse Sarey in 2019, not the week after his conviction in June 2024.

This post was also updated to show that Tacoma Deputy Police Chief Paul Junger, whom ex-Chief Avery Moore brought with him from the Dallas Police Department to change the culture of the department, was fired this week after an equal opportunity employment investigation.

What Justice Looks Like—Or Doesn’t—in 2025

Earlier this month, five years to the day of Manny Ellis' killing by Tacoma police officers, I happened to be in town for medical appointments; appointments not unlike the ones Manny had been going to in the last months of his life. As I drove up I-5, I felt tears welling up as the parallels in our mental health journeys hit me.

After I got some snacks from the 7-Eleven Manny used to walk to at night, I headed to the intersection of 96th & Ainsworth— retracing Manny’s final steps—just in time to see a TPD cruiser blow through a red light. It wasn’t even close. I wondered if they were conscious of where they were and when, or if they just wanted to get away from Hosmer.

The wooden green and white bench by the crosswalk button no longer has a Justice for Manny banner hanging on the backrest. A bakery tucked in with the housing beneath the stoplight at the end of Ainsworth had a new sign and pink balloons.

Just over a year earlier, when my old coworker Mayowa Aina and I made the same walk, the bakery owner told us the neighborhood had changed very little since she moved around 2010. She knew the area had an especially bad rap from recent headlines but shrugged off my question about her feelings about living there.

I get used to it already. You just get used to everything. ...
I'm OK. I've been here 14 years.

Soon after finishing my walk earlier this month, I learned that ex-Auburn officer Jeff Nelson, recently convicted of murdering Jesse Sarey in 2019, had officially surrendered his state peace officer certification. Minutes later, I got a call from the mother of Branden Vorak, a man killed during a mental health crisis, saying the prosecutor’s office was finally releasing findings in his case—nearly three years after his fatal shooting. Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney Mary Robnett personally wrote findings that the three officers, who all declined to make statements, were justified.

In late January, I had lunch with many of the Pacific Northwest families who have lost loved ones to police violence since I started journalism in college around the beginning of Trump’s first presidency, a few years after the protest over Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson in 2014.

These families, linked involuntarily by tragedy, were celebrating a big mark of progress for local police accountability: the first-ever sentencing of a Washington police officer, Jeff Nelson, for murder on duty, in the 2019 shooting of Jesse Sarey. At the same time, they also mourned countless others whose killings never got court hearings, let alone classified as homicides.

Since the killing of Manny Ellis by Tacoma police in March 2020 and the murder of George Floyd about three months later, more than 120 people have died in the care of Washington law enforcement, a four-year low that is now trending toward pre-pandemic levels. No officers have been charged for killing on duty since Nelson in 2020 and the three Tacoma officers acquitted of killing Ellis in 2021.

Sometimes I’m left asking myself, what’s changed? Well, a lot, actually, even though it doesn't always feel like it.

Here’s what else stands out most recently from those cases, two of Washington's most prominent police killings of the past several years and among the rare instances outside of King County's broken inquest program where officers have faced public proceedings over deaths in custody.

Nelson Hands Over His Badge

• Earlier this month, Nelson surrendered his state peace officer certification, which was set to be automatically revoked due to his felony conviction.
• The ex-officer’s attorneys filed an appeal in February, a few weeks after his sentencing to nearly 17 years in prison by Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps, who declined to recuse herself or grant a new trial just before Christmas.
• Gaines Phelps, one of a handful of local Black judges, remained on the case after defense allegations of misconduct against the state and herself, including that she had an improper meeting with a juror, who was also Black, after he had complained about his treatment by building security. The juror confirmed in a hearing that Gaines Phelps was not there, contradicting a sheriff’s sergeant in charge of security at the courthouse who had also tattled about another conversation involving jurors.
• The judge handed Nelson a sentence toward the top of the standard range, telling the courtroom she was persuaded little by testimony from family members who painted Nelson as a teddy bear and from an Auburn assistant chief who said he wouldn’t have disciplined him for killing Sarey. Mayor Nancy Backus attended, sitting near Nelson’s family and wife, who is still an officer. Chief Mark Caillier sat in uniform for closing arguments and the verdict.
• The week following his sentencing, the city of Auburn fired Nelson. City leaders have still declined to condemn his actions and long history of using unnecessary force with impunity.

Tacoma Still Not Settling

• Tacoma police officers have sat for depositions in federal civil rights lawsuits involving the family of Manny Ellis and Dustin Dean, another man beaten by officer Masyih Ford and former officer Timothy Rankine.
  • Here’s Rankine’s deposition in the latter case, in which he denies hearing Dean say he couldn’t breathe, among other things, captured on cell phone footage, and an expert report that I bought and uploaded for free to Court Listener.

Attorney: Do you see your right hand in this image?
Rankine: I think so, yeah.
Attorney: Okay. And it's around his neck, right?
Rankine: It appears that it's around his chest.
Attorney: Okay. To you, at the 15-second mark, what you're seeing is your arm around his chest and not his neck?

• Here is the Ellis v. Tacoma docket.
• The city of Tacoma is progressing toward trial in both cases after late last year paying out nearly $15 million because police officers returned a gun to a shooting suspect who later used the weapon to paralyze a man in a road rage incident.
• The federal Department of Justice review of Ellis’ death for civil rights violation hadn’t been closed as of earlier this year, according to the last email I got from a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle. That was before Trump removed Biden appointee Tessa Gorman and he has yet to nominate a replacement. New federal police accountability measures appear dead on arrival under Trump, and some existing reforms are being undone.
• Gorman’s predecessor as U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, Nick Brown, was elected Washington Attorney General last year, the first Black person to hold the office. While three ex-officers—Matthew Collins and Christopher "Shane" Burbank, who stopped Ellis, then beat, choked, and Tasered him into handcuffs, and Timothy Rankine, who sat on Ellis' back despite him saying he couldn't breathe—have been acquitted of state felony charges, could Brown decide to put the case back under review? Could he consider charges against the officer many close to the case say is most culpable in Ellis' death, Armando Farinas?
• Meanwhile, Tacoma’s first Black police chief, hired from Dallas to usher in culture change and modern strategies, resigned after three years of petty complaints against him and other top Black officials from the white-led police union. What a time to write a book.
• And just this week, Deputy Police Chief Paul Junger, whom Moore brought with him from Dallas, was fired this week after an equal opportunity employment investigation. Junger ran the day-to-day for TPD under Moore and was previously accused of racist behavior by Moore's close friend and former department chief of staff, Curtis Hairston.

PS: Apologies for taking the March edition down to the wire. My 4-year-old tuxedo cat had to go to the emergency vet yesterday and was put under to stitch up some wounds that hadn't been healing and then got infected. As you can see below, he's recovering well beside my desk with the 2025 Oscar-winning animated film starring a black cat, Flow, on repeat.

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I'm still transferring over old links from previous folders and catching up on more recent months, but please send feedback as you have it to jared@t2pnw.news.