The victims were identified as Sgt Mark Renninger, 39; Ronald Owens, 37; Tina Griswold, 40; and Greg Richards 42 - all married with children
Staff and customers at the coffee shop were not shot at by the gunman
Police said Maurice Clemmons was one of several people investigators want to talk to but that he could not be called a suspect at this point
Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said the officers had been specifically targeted
A Lakewood, Wash., city employee takes flowers to police headquarters in memory of the four slain officers.
A 37-year-old man with an extensive criminal past was sought for questioning last night after four police officers were fatally shot at a coffee shop as they sat working on their laptops.
One of the officers fought with the gunman and may have wounded him before dying just outside the doorway of the shop, said Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer, who described yesterday morning's shootings as a targeted ambush.
Troyer said Maurice Clemmons of Tacoma was one of several people investigators wanted to talk to. The sheriff's office said Clemmons had an extensive violent criminal history in Arkansas, including aggravated robbery and theft. He also recently was arrested and charged in Pierce County with assaulting a police officer and raping a child.
The four officers were with the 100-member police department of Lakewood, which adjoins the unincorporated area of Parkland, where the shootings took place. They were identified as Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39; Ronald Owens, 37; Tina Griswald, 40; and Greg Richards, 42.
Investigators say they think two of the officers were shot dead while sitting in the Forza Coffee Shop and a third was killed after standing up, Troyer said. The fourth apparently struggled with the gunman, getting off a few shots before collapsing outside the door.
"We believe there was a struggle, a commotion, a fight . . . that he fought the guy all the way out the door," Troyer said.
Troyer said the attack was clearly targeted at the officers, not a robbery gone bad.
"This was more of an execution," he said.
Troyer said the officers were catching up on paperwork at the start of their shift when they were attacked at 8:15 a.m. Pacific time. The coffee shop is in a small retail center.
"There were marked patrol cars outside, and they were all in uniform," Troyer said.
He said the gunman entered and walked up to the counter as though to place an order. A barista saw a gun when the man opened his jacket and she fled out the back door. The man then turned and opened fire on the officers.
Troyer said a couple of hundred officers from the Washington State Patrol and other agencies were at the crime scene, some on their own time.
In search of Maurice Clemmons to assists in the murder shoting of 4 cops.
Explosions were heard today as police searching for the killer of four officers shot dead in a suburban coffee shop in Washington reportedly tried to flush a man out of a house in Seattle.
Officers around the Pacific Northwest had been searching for Maurice Clemmons, 37, whom they say was near the coffee shop on the edge of the McChord Air Force Base when the shootings occurred.
Early this morning, police surrounded the house in Seattle and shone lights on the building as a hostage negotiator called out to Mr Clemmons by name.
"Mr Clemmons, I’d like to get you out of there safely. I can tell you this, we are not going away,” the negotiator said, before sirens began wailing, punctuated by several loud bangs.
“This is one of the toughest decisions you’ll make in your life, but you need to man up.”
The four officers have been named as Sergeant Mark Renninger and officers Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold and Greg Richards - all are married and have children. They were killed in a cold-blooded ambush that has shocked the country.
Investigators say they know of no reason why Clemmons or anyone else would have opened fire on the four officers as they sat working on their laptops early yesterday morning, catching up on paperwork at the beginning of their shifts.
“We’re going to be surprised if there is a motive worth mentioning,” said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sherriff’s office who sketched out a scene of controlled and deliberate carnage that spared the employees and other customers at the coffee shop in suburban Parkland.
“He was very versed with the weapon,” Mr Troyer said. “This wasn’t something where the windows were shot up and there bullets sprayed around the place. The bullets hit their targets.”
Mr Clemmons has an extensive violent criminal history from Arkansas, including aggravated robbery and theft, the sheriff’s office said. He also recently was arrested and charged in Washington state for assaulting a police officer, and second-degree rape of a child.
In 1989, Mr Clemmons, then 17, was convicted in Little Rock for aggravated robbery. He was paroled in 2000 after Mr Huckabee commuted a 95-year prison sentence.
The attack looks set to have a knock-on effect politically after it emerged that Mr Clemmons had had a lengthy jail term commuted by Mike Huckabee, the then governor of Arkansas, a decade ago.
Mr Huckabee came second to Senator John McCain in the 2008 contest for the Republican presidential nomination and recent polls have made him an early frontrunner for 2012.
But the controversy could deal a fatal blow to his presidential ambitions given past accusations that the conservative pastor was soft on crime. As governor of Arkansas Mr Huckabee helped to grant twice as many pardons and commutations as his three predecessors combined, including Bill Clinton.
Among those benefiting were Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist who was pardoned for a 1975 traffic offence after Mr Huckabee — who plays bass guitar in a band called Capitol Offense — met him at a rock concert.
They also included a castrated rapist called Wayne DuMond, who was released in 1999 after a politically controversial intervention by Mr Huckabee and went on to commit at least one murder. The case featured prominently during the 2008 Republican contest.
Mr Huckabee's "political action committee", dubbed HuckPAC, issued a statement last night clearly trying to distance the former governor from the decision to release Mr Clemmons by spreading the blame for the fact that he was not behind bars.
The statement lamented the "senseless and savage executions" of the four officers and noted early reports that police were searching for a "repeat offender who once lived in Arkansas".
It added: "Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State.
"He was recommended for and received a commutation of his original sentence from 1990, this commutation made him parole eligible and he was then paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time. He was arrested later for parole violation and taken back to prison to serve his full term, but prosecutors dropped the charges that would have held him."
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