The last thing Cindi Paulson remembers telling her stepdaughter Jennifer Paulson was to stay out of her apartment. Jed Waits, a man who had pursued Jennifer since college, had been arrested the Monday before for violating a restraining order she had taken out against him.
Joseph Laney
Courtesy of Paulson Family
Paulson, shown on graduation day with her dad, did not believe in dating, and carried an enormous course load at SPU.
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Jennifer, 30, assured Cindi she would stay with her mother and stepfather, but she still intended to go to work the next day as usual. "I know she was fearful, but she continued with her life anyway," Cindi says.
That night, Jennifer asked her mom to pray for Jed, also 30, Cindi would later learn. "She wasn't just mushy compassionate," Cindi says. "She lived her compassion."
Jennifer arrived at Birney Elementary School in Tacoma, where she taught special education, around 7:30 a.m. on February 26. As Paulson inched toward the building's entrance, Waits walked up behind her, pulled out a gun, and shot her, killing her almost instantly.
A witness told reporters that he heard three gunshots and the sound of a woman screaming. An AP photo from the crime scene shows a body draped in a tarp and a pair of red shoes sitting beside the body. The witness then saw Waits jump into his car and take off. Someone called 911 and a Pierce County deputy stopped his car outside a day-care center. Waits allegedly emerged from the car firing a semi-automatic weapon.
"We had a short gun battle with him and he lost and died," Sheriff's Office spokesperson Ed Troyer says by phone.
But the Pierce County Medical Examiner's office subsequently determined that, in fact, Waits killed himself. While he was hit by the deputy, a bullet to the head from his own gun ended his life.
More than 1,600 people attended a memorial service for Paulson at Life Center Church in Tacoma on March 2. An elementary school across the street from her parents' house planted a tree and teachers from Birney are raising money to have a mural painted, all in her honor.
For Waits, there were no obituaries or funeral notices. But former friends and acquaintances have expressed shock that Waits could have done such a thing.
His college roommate, Mark Frame, says that when a friend called to tell him what had happened, his first response was "I don't know him."
"Seriously, I was like, 'I know a Jed,'" Frame says now. But the scowling face of the killer being shown on the news was not the awkward student he remembered.
"That's definitely not the Jed that I knew," seconds Dwayne Smithgall, an associate pastor at Mercer Creek Church in Ellensburg, where Waits grew up. He recalls Waits as an artistic kid always willing to lend his talents in the form of promotional flyers and posters for the youth group.
I can understand their shock. I graduated from Seattle Pacific University in 2003, the same year Waits did. I was in Spokane with my family at the time of the shooting. Given the small size—around 600—of the classes at SPU, my mom immediately asked if I'd known Paulson. The name and face were familiar; she was a year ahead of me, and we had a few mutual friends. But beyond that I knew nothing about her.
The name that rang a bell as I watched the news was Waits'. It took me nearly a week to place it. Finally it clicked: The year I edited SPU's student newspaper, The Falcon, Waits was on staff as a cartoonist. He penned a weekly comic strip and occasional editorial illustrations. And while he had his quirks, he was a friendly face around the office and generally made deadlines, a prized quality in student-newspaper staff members. He's shown with a broad grin, eyes caught in mid-blink, in the staff photo on my dresser. If I were to compile a top-10 list of people I knew in college who might someday commit murder, Waits wouldn't be on it.
But apparently Waits had another side. Records from his two years in the Army National Guard show that he had been disciplined for spitting on other soldiers and fighting with superiors. He finally went AWOL while deployed in Kuwait, and was eventually discharged in part on the basis of a disturbing mental evaluation.
So while I may have been stunned when I realized that the Waits who had shot and killed Paulson was the same one I had known, fellow soldier Art York wasn't. Hearing the news of Paulson's death, York, speaking by phone from a veterans hospital in Arizona where he is recovering from a scorpion sting in Iraq that damaged his leg and foot, says, "I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised."
Frame was close to Paulson, much closer than he was to Waits. Paulson and Frame met in 1998 at freshman orientation. They hung out for hours, he says. And he developed a pretty serious crush.
But Paulson had read Joshua Harris' I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book which argues that not only should faithful Christians not have sex before marriage, they shouldn't casually date either. "I didn't understand, but I respected it," Frame says. "We remained really good friends all the way through college."
