SEATTLE — Using search dogs and going door to door, hundreds of police intensified the hunt Monday for the man wanted in the coffee-shop killings of four officers after he was not found in a house raided by a SWAT team.
The realization that the suspect had not been cornered after all further rattled people in the Seattle area, many of them unnerved by the thought of a mentally unstable killer in their midst.
Police canvassed the neighborhood around the Seattle house and fanned out across the city, looking for any sign of Maurice Clemmons, 37. Authorities posted a $125,000 reward for information leading to his arrest in the Sunday- morning shooting rampage.
Killed were Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39, and officers Ronald Owens, 37; Tina Griswold, 40; and Greg Richards, 42.
The manhunt came as authorities in two states took heat for the fact that Clemmons was allowed to walk the streets despite a teenage crime spree in Arkansas that landed him a 95-year prison sentence. He was released in 2000 after then-Gov. Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence.
“This guy should have never been on the street,” said Brian D. Wurts, president of the police union in Lakewood, where all four slain officers worked. “Our elected officials need to find out why these people are out.”
Police said they are not sure what prompted Clemmons to kill the officers as they worked on their laptop computers at the beginning of their shifts.
He was described as increasingly erratic in the past few months and had been arrested recently on charges of assaulting a police officer.
Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer told the Tacoma News-Tribune that Clemmons “made comments the night before to people that he was going to shoot police and watch the news.”
Authorities said the gunman singled out the officers and spared employees and other customers at the coffee shop in a suburb about 35 miles south of Seattle. He then fled, but not before he apparently was shot in the torso by one of the dying officers.
Police later learned that he might have been holed up at the house in Seattle.
After an all-night siege in which they tried to get him out using loudspeakers, explosions and a robot sent into the house, a SWAT team stormed the place and discovered that he was not there.
It was not clear whether he slipped past police, left before they arrived or was never in the house at all, but Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said there was evidence that Clemmons at one point was on the property.
Police spent the day frantically chasing leads, at one point cordoning off a park where people thought they saw Clemmons. They alerted hospitals to be on the lookout for a man seeking treatment for gunshot wounds.
Investigators also examined the coffee shop for clues. Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Dave McDonald said authorities found a handgun carried by the killer.
“He was very versed with the weapon,” Troyer said earlier. “This wasn’t something where the windows were shot up and there were bullets sprayed around the place. The bullets hit their targets.”
