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PORT ANGELES — Terrified and hysterical, Rebecca Messinger crouches in the bushes in the dark behind the house where her boyfriend lies shot to death.
Her only lifeline is the calm voice of the emergency dispatcher on her cellphone.
“I still need help,” she tells Peninsula Communications dispatcher Mary Rife.
In the last of several calls beginning at 7:09 p.m. Tuesday, she could do little but sob.
Those calls have already drawn police officers to the house, but Messinger remains hidden in the alley, afraid to move and almost too frightened even to speak.
“I don’t want to talk in case he’s anywhere near,” she tells Rife in one of the few sentences that can be clearly heard on the recording of the desperate 9-1-1 call from 130 W. 11th St.
“OK, Becca, there’s officers there now,” Rife says. “Where is the person that’s doing the shooting?”
“Tell them I need them to come now,” Messinger says, gasping.
Much of the four-minute call is unintelligible.
Messinger manages to tell Rife — who is working with a team of dispatchers that includes supervisor Deb Homan and Chelsey Jung — where she is.
Messinger mentions a couple of times the back door, which police found kicked in and covered in blood before following the bloody trail to the laundry room, where Gerald David “Jerry” Howell lay dead of a gunshot to the head.
Even when Messinger understands that police are there and have detained an armed man, she is afraid to leave her hiding place until she knows the man she fears is in custody.
“Becca, they are already out with a man with a gun,” Rife tells her. “They have him detained. Can you come out so they can see you?”
“Can you tell me what he looks like, please?” Messinger sobs.
“She wants to know what he looks like first,” Rife says to someone in the office. “She’s afraid he’s still at large.”
“OK,” she tells Becca, “I’m letting them know.”
“Do they have him?” Messinger asks Rife a few seconds later. “Do they have Gary Borneman?”
Only after she is assured that the man in custody is indeed Borneman does Messinger begin to creep toward the lights of the patrol car and the safety of the police officers who have come to help her.
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Managing Editor/News Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3531 or at leah.leach@peninsuladailynews.com.
Reporter Arwyn Rice contributed to this report.
