PORT ANGELES — Authorities described the mobilization of a neighborhood in west Port Angeles in response to the threat posed by double-murder suspect John F. Loring when they spoke at a Wednesday afternoon press conference.
Law enforcement officers don’t know the motive behind two murders and a suicide that ended a standoff on Wednesday, they said.
“We don’t know the answer to that yet,” Clallam County Undersheriff Ron Peregrine said.
“There is no known motive.”
Loring barricaded himself inside an apartment at Evergreen Court Apartments, 2202 W. 16th St., before shooting himself in the head with a handgun at about noon Wednesday, killing himself and bringing an approximately 27-hour trail of violence to a close.
Dry Creek School did not send any school buses Wednesday morning to the heavily residential area of tidy, low-income apartments, Peregrine said.
Law enforcement authorities evacuated between 15 and 20 people from apartments, and locked down about 25 units, said Ron Cameron, Clallam County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy.
At Serenity House’s adjacent Evergreen Family Village, which provides transitional housing for the homeless, residents were notified to be careful as the standoff unfolded, Serenity House Executive Director Kathy Wahto said.
“A case manager spoke with residents, updated them, knocked on doors, asked them as much as possible to stay inside,” Wahto said.
Loring, 45, was suspected of murder in the shooting death of David J. Randle, 19, who was shot at about 10:15 a.m. Tuesday morning at Randle’s Woodcock Road residence.
Loring was also suspected in the death — by blunt-force trauma or shooting, police said they weren’t sure as of Wednesday — of Ray Varney, 68, whose body was found later Tuesday at his Diamond Point residence on Fleming Road.
Authorities believe Varney was killed before Randle because Loring was driving Varney’s pickup truck when he fled from the Woodcock Road residence, they said.
Loring could have proven to be more than a handful by the time he reached Evergreen Court, officers at the news conference said.
“His thinking was akin to a survivalist,” said Brian Smith, deputy chief of the Port Angeles Police Department.
“We had prior information by officers that he had dabbled in explosives,” Clallam County Undersheriff Ron Peregrine said.
“What they said was, he was really into guns.”
Officials discovered Varney’s body by tracing the license plate on the vehicle to Varney’s residence, but before they traced it, they did a countywide sweep in an attempt to find it.
“I can’t tell you how many white pickup trucks there are in Clallam County,” Peregrine quipped. “There are a lot of them.”
Authorities found the truck abandoned and still don’t know how Loring arrived at Evergreen Court, they said.
A State Patrol SWAT team, complete with an armored personnel carrier, was deployed to the apartments.
Loring’s body was found in the apartment bathroom, his phone in his lap and a handgun in his hand, authorities said.
The four people who were in the apartment when Loring arrived never appeared to be in danger and left by 6:30 a.m., when officers made their first telephone contact with Loring, officials said at the news conference.
At one point, Loring told others in the apartment, ‘You need to leave,’” Peregrin said.
“He obviously knew his issues were not theirs.”
Loring knew police were outside the apartment at 2:30 a.m. but they did not contact him until 6:30 a.m., Clallam County Sheriff Bill Benedict said.
With all the preparations for a potential violent ending, Benedict said Loring at one point appeared close to giving himself up.
“When we first contacted him, we were very encouraged,” Benedict said.
“He spoke to the negotiator on and off for a little over two hours,” he said.
“It looked like we got him close to the door once, where they thought they were going to get him to walk out and surrender.”
The people in the apartment were “interviewed extensively,” Benedict said.
Benedict said it did not appear any of the four would be charged with harboring a fugitive.
“The best we can tell is that any relationship they had was extremely casual.”
By the time Loring took his own life, “we had consumed the bulk of our resources,” Port Angeles Deputy Police Chief Brian Smith said.
He noted that despite the participation of a multi-agency task force that included law enforcement agencies from across the North Olympic Peninsula — as well as phone conversations with authorities in Victoria, where Loring was from — arrangements were being made to contact the Kitsap Sheriff’s Department SWAT team to take over for the State Patrol.
“No agency here is big enough to operate independently,” he said.
Peregrin said about 100 officers worked the case.
“That is almost every law enforcement officer on the North Olympic Peninsula,” he said.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
