This is the story of the teen high-school football player who committed murder in Marysville because his girlfriend apparently had a sexual relationship with a classmate. It involves the Tulalip Reservation and a deceptive invitation by the killer to lure his prey to a fatal get-together.
But this is not the story of 15-year-old football player Jaylen Fryberg, who committed murder in Marysville on October 24 because his former girlfriend apparently had a relationship with a classmate. The school’s homecoming prince and a Tulalip tribal member, Fryberg texted his five victims to meet him in the cafeteria at Marysville-Pilchuck High School that day, then arrived with a handgun and killed or mortally wounded three of them, severely wounding two others before killing himself.
Eleven years earlier, a 17-year-old football player named Jenson Hankins killed in the same town for much the same reason. Though he was from Roosevelt High in Seattle and committed his single murder off school grounds, the similarities of his case could tell us something about Fryberg’s puzzling actions and the apathy of friends.
As Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary said last week, because Fryberg isn’t alive to explain, “The question everybody wants [answered] is ‘Why?’, and quite candidly I don’t know [if] the why is something we can provide.”
Unlike Fryberg, Hankins did not kill himself afterward. And ultimately he supplied some answers. He said he brutally murdered his school chum, John Jasmer, 17, because he thought Jasmer had raped Hankins’ girlfriend—or at least had consensual sex with her. Hankins took it personally, telling a friend that Jasmer “ruined my life.”
But, once convicted, Hankins had an epiphany. He was sorry for what he’d done and, heading to prison, realized he’d ruined his own life. He told Jasmer’s family in court, “I ask God, I ask my family, and I try to ask your family to try to forgive me.”
Not that Jasmer’s supporters bought it. “There was not a bit of remorse in his voice,” a family friend told The Seattle Times, “and not a tear was shed.”
Fryberg’s motive also appears to stem from his relationships. His latest girlfriend had reportedly just broken up with him, leaving him depressed. He was said to be pursuing another girl, Zoe Galasso, but she turned him down to date his cousin, Andrew Fryberg.
Galasso was the first to die in the cafeteria shooting, and Andrew, badly wounded, remains in critical condition. (The other victims, Gia Soriano and Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, both 14, died last week. Nate Hatch, 14, also a cousin of Jaylen Fryberg, is in serious condition.)
Fryberg posted desperate thoughts on his Twitter feed up to the day before the shooting. Much of it was about unrequited love, sexual desires, and teen angst, suggesting that Fryberg was emotionally drained, though no one seemed to notice. “It breaks me . . . It actually does,” he tweeted three days before the shootings, “If I just laid down . . . ”
There was no Twitter in 2003. But court records show that an angry and ashamed Hankins became obsessed with settling the score with Jasmer, who reportedly told friends that Hankins’ girlfriend had invited the sex. (The girl reported the incident to Seattle Police as a rape, then recanted, and the investigation was dropped. At Hankins’ trial, she again claimed she’d been raped).
Hankins began plotting Jasmer’s death, and recruited a helper. On August 20, 2003, Hankins and co-defendant Joshua Goldman, 17, drove to the Tulalip reservation and, deep in the woods, dug a grave. The next day, Hankins invited Jasmer to go with him and Goldman to visit a Marysville marijuana farm. The three Roughrider football players were close and called themselves “The J Crew” for their first-name initials.
In the woods, Jasmer was clubbed with a hammer by Goldman and knifed in the neck by Hankins. Battered and bloody, stabbed 29 times, Jasmer struggled to breathe until Goldman put his hand over Jasmer’s mouth and nose. He was dragged to the grave and buried.
Word spread among friends and then to Seattle police, who arrested the twosome a week later. Charged with first-degree murder in Snohomish County Superior Court, Goldman pled guilty and testified against Hankins, who was convicted by a jury. He got 27 years, Goldman got 25. Both are doing time today, facing release within the next 10 years. Hankins, on an Internet prison pen-pals page, refers to himself as “Mr. Nice Guy.”
Jasmer’s family collected a $250,000 settlement from the Seattle School District for negligence after learning that a parent and an official from another school had called Roosevelt High before the killing to relay rumors of a murder plan—but no one called back. The district vowed to take such calls more seriously.
But it was the advice of Jasmer’s mother, Donna, that rang loudest then, and it should ring anew at Marysville-Pilchuck this week as students returned to class. “Really listen to your friends,” the mother told the Seattle P-I. “No matter how much you don’t want to be involved, you need to speak up. If someone had acted sooner, my son would still be alive.”
randerson@seattleweekly.com
Rick Anderson writes about sex, crime, money, and politics, which tend to be the same thing. His latest book is Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches From the Emerald City.
