OLYMPIA, Wash. — A lawyer for some of the victims of a 2008 shooting spree in Skagit County says Washington state has agree to pay $9 million to settle claims that the violence could have been prevented.
Isaac Zamora killed six people and wounded four others. Lawyer Jack Connelly represents some of the surviving victims and estates of those killed. He says the Department of Corrections misclassified Zamora as a nonviolent offender -- instead of a mentally ill, violent one -- following his release from the Okanagan County Jail shortly before the shootings.
Connelly says the community corrections officer assigned to his case also failed to monitor him -- and if she had, she would have learned he had been keeping guns in the trailer where he was staying, resulting in Zamora's arrest before the rampage. A Corrections spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.