Arlington father and son arrested in deadly shootout that frightened Pierce County neighborhood

LAKEWOOD, Wash. — Lakewood residents are still on edge, weeks after a deadly shooting riddled their neighborhood with bullets.

Now an Arlington father and son are in custody, charged with murder.

The arrests late last week came nearly four weeks after the shooting terrified the residents of a Lakewood neighborhood.

Eyewitnesses said the shoot-out was between two vehicles. When it was over, one man was dead and three others, including a woman, were injured.

Police got some high-tech help cracking this case. A tracking device embedded in the suspects’ vehicle gave police the timeline to help nab this father and son.

The evidence of what happened here is still visible. Glass that eyewitnesses say came from the target vehicle. And there are the bullet holes in that mobile home, while the person who lives there was inside.

“I have some in my glass windows right here, that one, that one,” said Marquis Johnson as he pointed out the bullet holes.

Johnson had just gotten home from work when the shooting started.

“Through the front of my house right here,” he said. “And over there is where my couch is. So, I always sit right here. I’m like this is my back corner towards my TV. So, it went right through the couch and popped right through the living room. Yeah, with me sitting in the living room.”

This is what it sounded like. A hail of gunfire aimed at a car with four people inside but terrorizing an entire neighborhood.

“And we got a little closer and we saw people getting out of the big truck with guns,” said a pregnant woman, still too afraid to be identified. She said she and her boyfriend were going to get ice cream.

“And then they started shooting more,” she said. “And then we backed up and went and left.”

It took nearly four weeks of shoe-leather police work for Lakewood detectives to arrest two suspects, 41-year-old Julio Lucas and his 23-year-old son, Matthew.

Detectives said they tied the duo to the shooting through an A T & T SIM or “Subscriber Identity Module” embedded in their Chevy Silverado.

The tracker showed the vehicle left Arlington at 2:31 p.m. on Sunday, August 25th. At 5:04, the vehicle parked on Tacoma Mall Boulevard in Lakewood where it stayed for nearly two and a half hours.

Then for three, long minutes, it was near the homicide scene.

The vehicle left, sat in a Tacoma parking lot a couple more hours, then returned to Arlington at one minute past midnight.

The bullets shattered the top of Marquis’s cell phone.

“When it went through the couch,” he said, holding his cell phone, “it hit a lighter and this.”

And they destroyed this neighborhood’s sense of security.

“It was very scary,” said the pregnant woman. She said she now worries every time she leaves home.

Surveillance video and cell phone records confirmed the timeline, too. Lakewood police said they have not found any of the weapons used. And they said they have not identified the other accomplices.

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