A 44-year-old man has pleaded not guilty to a fatal stabbing in a moving car on Interstate 5 that occurred after he and others in the vehicle allegedly spent the morning smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl in Tacoma.
Jeffery Scott was arraigned in King County Superior Court on charges of second-degree murder and two counts of second-degree assault in the June 26 incident that happened in a stolen BMW occupied by four people on the northbound lanes of the interstate in Federal Way.
Prosecutors allege that Scott was in the backseat of the car when he pulled a 5-inch knife, stabbed a man seated next to him in the back, slashed open the 19-year-old driver’s throat and began knifing the front-seat passenger, a 30-year-old woman.
The driver, Patriot Ryan Lemay, was armed with a firearm, according to court records. He shot Scott several times before stopping the vehicle on the shoulder, where he succumbed to his neck injury.
The backseat passenger reportedly jumped out of the vehicle while it was still moving. Troopers came across him and the front-seat passenger while the victims ran to a weigh station for help. At the BMW, troopers found Lemay dead in the driver’s seat. Scott was lying in the grass nearby.
At arraignment Wednesday at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, Judge Johanna Bender ordered Scott held in jail on $5 million bail, court records show. The hearing had been delayed several times since being set for July 18 because Scott was still in the hospital.
Senior deputy prosecuting attorney Terence Carlstrom requested that high bail in charging documents, arguing that Scott was an “extreme threat” to the public.
“In addition to the violence directed towards the other three occupants of the car he was riding in, his attack on the driver created a substantial risk of a catastrophic crash endangering the lives of other motorists on the roadway,” Carlstrom wrote.
Traffic was backed up for miles on the interstate after the State Patrol responded about 2:23 p.m. Backups stretched from the Puyallup River bridge to where Scott was arrested just north of South 375th Street in Federal Way.
Scott’s defense attorney, Sandro Parrotta, of Obsidian Law Offices in Seattle, did not return a phone call Friday.
Scott and the 30-year-old woman later told detectives that everyone in the car smoked methamphetamine and fentanyl in an apartment in Tacoma off and on for about three hours that morning. The woman reportedly said they then drove toward Kent to help a friend.
Twenty minutes before the stabbing, Scott allegedly began waving his knife around and messing with the 32-year-old man next to him in the backseat. That man later told detectives Scott said something to the effect of, “I’m gonna kill both you guys,” before he attacked them.
The defendant was interviewed by detectives at St. Joseph Medical Center on July 1 and 2. He reportedly told them he’d met the other man who was in the backseat a few days earlier and met Lemay and the 30-year-old woman on the day of the incident. Records state Scott first told detectives that the others in the car tried to rob him, then later claimed that Lemay and the woman had talked about killing him while they were driving.
“Scott said he knew he had to make a split decision, either jump out of the car and get run over or he could cut Lemay’s throat and try to survive,” a State Patrol detective wrote in a report. “He said he did it out of fear.”
Inside the BMW, detectives found a double-sided knife with blood stains, seven .40-caliber bullet casings and multiple “smoking devices.” Scott allegedly admitted to detectives that the knife was his.
According to court records, Scott said he has lived in Washington for 11 years, but he did not have a stable address for several months. He is from Florida, where he was convicted in 2006 of lewd or lascivious battery.