A Driver Fled Pierce County Deputies Twice. The Second Run Ended in a Fireball With Children in the Other Car.

It started as an ordinary traffic stop. Around 5:22 p.m. on Saturday, June 20, 2026, a Pierce County (D-leaning county, WA) deputy tried to pull over a car near the Alta Apartments off Steele Street South in Tacoma. The driver did not stop. He took off at high speed, and within minutes a routine stop had become a chase that ended in a three-car wreck and a vehicle on fire.

When the wreckage came to rest at 110th Street South and Pacific Avenue South, four people in the car the suspect struck were hurt — two of them children. A deputy was injured too. According to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, the 22-year-old behind the wheel fled not once but twice, even stopping at one point to try to pry a tracking device off his own car before speeding off again.

Deputies booked him into the Pierce County Jail on DUI, four counts of vehicular assault, felony hit-and-run, two counts of eluding, and resisting arrest. He is presumed innocent of those charges until a court says otherwise. But the case lands in the middle of a years-long fight over when Washington police are allowed to chase a fleeing driver at all.

• 2 children — among four people in the struck vehicle hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries · Source: MyNorthwest; KIRO 7
• 1 deputy — injured in the crash and taken to a hospital, later released with a minor injury · Source: KIRO 7; KOMO News
• 2 attempts — the driver fled deputies twice — stopping once to try to remove a tracking device before speeding off again · Source: MyNorthwest; KIRO 7
• 9 charges — DUI, four counts of vehicular assault, felony hit-and-run, two counts of eluding, and resisting arrest (alleged) · Source: KIRO 7; MyNorthwest
• Initiative 2113 — the 2024 voter-driven measure that rolled back Washington's restrictive 2021 pursuit law — the backdrop to every chase decision in this state · Source: KING 5; Ballotpedia

The sequence, as the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office laid it out, was unusually drawn out. A deputy moved to stop the car near the Alta Apartments off Steele Street South; the driver sped away. Because traffic forced the car to slow, deputies were able to deploy a GPS tracking device onto it and then back off the active chase — the cautious move the modern pursuit playbook calls for. Minutes later, deputies found the car stopped near 84th Street and Yakima Avenue, where the man was trying to peel the tracker off his vehicle. As deputies approached, he jumped back in and fled a second time. That run ended at 110th Street South and Pacific Avenue South — State Route 7 — where his car plowed into another vehicle and a third was caught in the wreck.

Keep Reading

Society · DOGE Watch

The Auditor Keeps Telling the SEC, HUD, and SBA How to Stop Losing Money — and They Keep Not Doing It

Read →

“The driver fled, deputies tracked the car and pulled back — and then the man got back in and ran again. The second time, there were children in the car he hit.”

Summary of the Pierce County Sheriff's Office account, June 20, 2026

The wreck involved three vehicles, and one of them caught fire. Four occupants of the car the suspect struck were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries; two of the four were children. One deputy was also hurt and transported, then released with a minor injury. The corridor — Pacific Avenue South through the Parkland area between Tacoma and Puyallup — was shut down for hours while Washington State Patrol troopers assisted the Sheriff’s Office with the investigation. The driver ran from the crash on foot, but deputies caught him and took him into custody.

Deputies reported a gun was visible inside the suspect’s car in plain view, and the Sheriff’s Office said the vehicle would be searched under a warrant. The 22-year-old — whose name the Sheriff’s Office had not publicly released as of this writing — was booked on DUI, four counts of vehicular assault, felony hit-and-run, two counts of eluding, and resisting arrest. None of those charges has been proven; he is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Every pursuit decision in Washington now runs through a law that voters and lawmakers have spent five years fighting over. In 2021, the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed restrictions that barred police from chasing a fleeing driver unless they had reason to believe the person had committed a narrow set of serious crimes — a violent or sex offense, domestic violence, a DUI, or an escape. Backers said high-speed pursuits were themselves a leading cause of death from police activity. Critics said the rule turned fleeing into a free pass: KING 5’s investigative desk found Washington State Patrol logged nearly 8,000 incidents of drivers simply refusing to stop in the years after the restriction took effect.

Keep Reading

Society · DOGE Watch

GAO: A $2 Trillion Jet That Can Fly Every Mission Only One Day in Four

Read →

The backlash produced Initiative 2113. The grassroots group Let’s Go Washington gathered more than 400,000 signatures, and rather than send it to the ballot, the Legislature itself adopted it — the Senate 36–13 and the House 77–20 in March 2024. As of June 2024, police can again pursue a driver on reasonable suspicion of any law violation, provided the person is a threat to others, the risk of letting them go outweighs the risk of the chase, and a supervisor signs off. The deputy who tracked Saturday’s car and then pulled back was operating inside that framework.

Saturday’s crash is a snapshot of the exact trade-off the pursuit debate keeps circling. Chase a fleeing driver and you risk a wreck like this one; let him go and, critics argue, you teach every other driver that flooring it is a viable escape. The deputy in this case did the conservative thing — tracked the car, backed off — and the danger still materialized the moment the suspect chose to run a second time. The harm here flows from that choice, not from an officer’s recklessness.

The cost is not abstract for the families involved. Two children rode in a car that a fleeing driver slammed into hard enough to start a fire on a public arterial during Saturday-evening traffic. Pierce County, anchored by Tacoma, leans Democratic and sits inside a state where the policing rules are written by a Democratic legislature in Olympia. When the rules governing chases shift, it is intersections like 110th and Pacific — and the people stopped at them — that absorb the result.

The crash arrives in a county whose sheriff has been openly at war with the state’s Democratic leadership over how policing is regulated. Sheriff Keith Swank (R) — elected in 2024 after three decades in law enforcement — has tangled with Olympia over surveillance limits and over a 2026 law, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson (D), that tightened eligibility standards for sheriffs and made it easier for a state board to remove an elected one. Critics in both parties have noted the measure looked aimed squarely at Swank. He responded by deactivating Pierce County’s automated license-plate reader network, arguing the new restrictions had rendered it useless.

None of that changes the facts of Saturday’s crash. But it is the political weather the case sits in: a Republican sheriff who says state law ties his hands, a Democratic legislature that writes the pursuit rules, and a county where the people who pay when those two collide are drivers and their kids on an ordinary weekend road.

A 22-year-old allegedly fled Pierce County deputies twice and crashed into a car carrying children, injuring four people and a deputy and setting a vehicle ablaze on a Tacoma-area arterial. He faces DUI, vehicular-assault, hit-and-run, eluding, and resisting charges, and is presumed innocent until a court rules. The deputy who tried to stop him did exactly what Washington’s revised pursuit law contemplates — tracked the car and disengaged — and the crash still happened the instant the suspect chose to run again. That is the unresolved core of the state’s five-year pursuit fight: no policy setting eliminates the risk a fleeing driver creates. We’ll update this story as charges are formally filed and the suspect is named.

More From Civic Intelligence

Society · DOGE Watch

GAO: Broken Federal Data Plumbing Is Driving an Estimated $186 Billion a Year in Improper Payments

A June 2026 GAO report found more than 100 federal eligibility data sources that can't reliably…

Society · DOGE Watch

GAO Puts a Number on the DOGE Cuts: Nearly 378,000 Federal Separations in 2025

The Government Accountability Office reported nearly 378,000 separations across major federal…

Last updated June 22, 2026