Suspect killed after fatal shooting of officer in Washington state

A suspect who engaged police in a shootout and staged a nearly 12-hour standoff was shot and killed on Thursday morning in Tacoma, an urban port city in Washington state, police said.

An officer of Tacoma Police Department, identified by the department as Reginald "Jake" Gutierrez, was fatally shot at the early stage of the incident, which began around 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday as a domestic disturbance incident.

The male shooter, identified by his family as Bruce R. Johnson II, then barricaded himself inside the house with a 6-year-old boy and a 8-year-old girl. "We negotiated through the night. Negotiations failed," Pierce County Sheriff's Office spokesman Ed Troyer said.

At around 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, a SWAT team moved into the house, rescued one the children and a sheriff's deputy outside the house fired a shot through a bedroom window while the suspect tried to grab the other child, killing the man. The second child was safe and later sent to a hospital together with the first one as a precaution.

About the fallen officer, a 45-year-old veteran of the local police force since 1999, Tacoma Police Department spokeswoman Loretta Cool told a press briefing that "we've suffered a great loss, and I think the community has suffered a great loss."

The incident took place in a working class neighborhood of Tacoma, the third largest city in Washington state with a population of about 200,000, and 32 miles, or 51 kilometers, southwest of Seattle, the largest city in the U.S. Pacific Northwest state. Endit