'It’s not like you are wanted for homicide': How a Kitsap murder suspect was arrested and released
Shaun David Rose sat on a Tacoma police patrol car bumper at a Fife gas station, surrounded by cops, and remarked that quite a few officers had shown up for him.
“We talked about this, you were driving a stolen vehicle,” Tacoma Officer Douglas Walsh told him, according to his body camera footage obtained last week by the Kitsap Sun. “It’s not like you are wanted for homicide or anything.”
Not yet, anyway.
It would be about two more hours before the bodies of Steven and Mina Shulz, both 51, would be found, shot and stuffed in a garbage can in the yard of their Olalla home.
Two days after that, Rose would be publicly identified as the suspect in their murders.
A day after that, he would be accused of getting away from Mason County sheriff's deputies in a chase but then arrested later that evening at a Tacoma gas station and charged with two counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
If convicted as charged, Rose, who pleaded not guilty, will face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of early release.
At 3:30 p.m. on Aug. 18, Walsh did not know, and could not have known, that he had the Shulzes' alleged killer in front of him, sitting on his bumper, and then let him walk away.
However, by taking the initiative to tail Rose and identify him as the driver of the stolen car — despite being discouraged from doing so — he inadvertently assisted Kitsap County sheriff's homicide detectives track down the Shulzes' alleged killer.
The Kitsap Sun reached out last week to a Tacoma Police Department spokesperson, who responded they received the request and were "working on it."
'Super suspicious'
From what Walsh could see, Rose had been driving a stolen Toyota Prius — taken from a distant neighbor of the Shulzes hours after they were killed.
Now Rose was answering questions in between gulps of a Starbucks Frappuccino, wearing an Amazon Logistics shirt and spinning a yarn about a woman named Brittany, no last name, who had handed over the Toyota Prius he was driving.
Later, talking to another Tacoma officer, Walsh would express doubts about the plausibility of Rose’s story: “He’s f______ lying.”
When talking to Rose, Walsh was more circumspect.
“Don’t you think this sounds super suspicious?” Walsh asked.
Rose conceded it sounded far-fetched.
“I’m sure that it does,” said Rose, who had been answering questions by saying “absolutely” and “absolutely not.”
Rose admitted that he didn’t question Brittany and didn't know much about her other than he met her at the Emerald Queen Casino and she gave him a Prius. Rose said he had been waiting for a ride and had not “had the best of luck lately.”
Daughter went to check on parents
The Shulzes' daughter went to the Shady Glen Avenue house Thursday, a couple of hours after Walsh questioned Rose about the stolen Prius, looking to check on her parents.
She called 911 at about 5:11 p.m. Detectives found a glass door leading to the couple’s master bedroom broken, the glass shattered by a gunshot. The bodies were found a short time later.
The couple were rising stars in the craft beer community and had planned to expand their brewing operation, E2W Brewing, short for East 2 West Brewing. Authorities said the Shulzes were victims of random violence and theorized Rose intended to burglarize their house.
Neighbors would tell detectives that at about 2:30 a.m. they had heard a noise that sounded like gunshots, establishing a possible time that the couple was killed.
Kitsap County sheriff's detectives also learned from neighbors that Rose lived in an RV on a neighboring property and spoke to his girlfriend.
His girlfriend told detectives that when she left for work at about 12:30 a.m. Thursday, Rose, wearing a gray T-shirt, was in her car but got out at the end of the street at Shady Glen Avenue and Burley Olalla Road, according to court documents.
The next contact she had with Rose was when he called her at 3:19 a.m. asking for a ride, she said. She told detectives that she refused.
Another witness told investigators they saw Rose go to the RV and then leave “in a hurry." Investigators wrote they found a gray T-shirt and jeans with blood on them.
At the time, Rose was facing felony residential burglary and theft of a firearm charges in Kitsap County Superior Court but didn’t show up on Aug. 10 for a pre-trial hearing, eight days before he allegedly killed the Shulzes.
In that case, Rose confessed to detectives to breaking into another Olalla residence in July 2021 and stealing at least a dozen semi-automatic rifles and handguns and was released on $25,000 bail.
During the interview with detectives, Rose said "stealing vehicles and burglarizing a home were not things he would normally have done and said it was all fueled by drugs, and he was sorry for what he had done and wished he'd never done any of it."
Walsh would not have known that Rose had missed his court hearing, as no arrest warrant was issued.
Stolen Prius
Randy Chittenden lives in Olalla at the end of a long driveway, about an hour's walk from where the Shulzes lived. Thursday morning his neighbors saw a man walking nearby carrying a big, yellow shovel.
At about 9 a.m. Chittenden's daughter drove his 2018 Toyota Prius down their long driveway to fetch the mail, then drove back and left the electronic key fob in the car.
A few minutes later she looked outside and noticed the Prius was gone. Leaned against a tree was the big, yellow shovel.
“He could have killed us all with a shovel,” Chittenden said during an interview with the Kitsap Sun. “We were thankful the keys were in the car, so he didn’t have to come in.”
Chittenden was notified by Tacoma police that they had found his car — though Chittenden said officers told him the suspect had run off. He picked it up at a tow yard and noted that it was in pretty good condition.
“Normally a stolen car gets beat up a little bit,” Chittenden said. “There was no damage at all.”
His daughter regularly drives the car, and while looking through the interior she found a sandwich bag containing identification and credit cards of the Shulzes. They called police and were told to sit tight and that officers would come pick up the baggy and impound the car again.
“We’ve lived here for 17 years and never had anything ever happen,” Chittenden said. “Now we are a little more cautious.”
'I'm not wasting my time'
Walsh kept Rose surrounded by other officers while checking Chittenden’s Prius and then asked a series of questions about Brittany, the woman who supposedly gave him the Prius.
Finally, Walsh told Rose, “You're under arrest for possession of a stolen vehicle.”
Rose let out a disappointed groan.
“However,” Walsh said, “I'm not going to take you to jail.”
“OK,” Rose said.
“Because they are not really booking on that. Actually they are, but they are probably going to (unknown) you,” Walsh said.
When asked where Rose lived, he gave directions to a homeless encampment near a transit park and ride. He also gave his parents’ address in Longbranch on the Key Peninsula. Walsh told him he might receive a summons in the mail, but he might not.
“In this county they're probably not even going to file the charge, which is why I'm not wasting my time taking you to jail,” Walsh told Rose.
He wouldn't let Rose take anything from the car, saying he didn't know to whom it might belong.
The gas station cashier, confused after seeing Rose leave the scene, came over to alert Walsh that the guy driving the stolen car, Rose, was walking away.
“He’s good,” Walsh told the cashier. “We arrested him, though, and then released him.”
While waiting for a tow truck to remove Chittenden's Prius from the Fife gas station, Walsh expressed frustration to another officer that the department didn’t want officers doing “proactive stuff” when they are so busy and he didn’t want to “tie up” other officers.
“It’s hard for me when I run across a stolen (car) like that,” Walsh said. “I can’t just let it go.”
'He’s high as s___.'
The Tacoma woman who helped police arrest Rose on Aug. 21, who asked to not be identified by name in this story, told the Kitsap Sun he showed up at her house. She said she didn’t know him well, describing their relationship as an acquaintance through family and friends.
“Shaun’s not a bad person,” she said. “It really surprised and shocked me that he would even be listed as a suspect.”
Rose went to her house, she thinks, because he figured nobody would look for him there. He showed up high on fentanyl.
“He’s not all there in his mind right now,” the woman said. “He wasn’t that day, I can tell you that much.”
She added: “I think he’s losing his brain a little bit because of the drugs.”
He told her he didn’t do it. She didn’t ask.
“I told him I didn't want to know.”
With a man wanted for murder at her house, high on opioids, she devised a plan.
“If he did do what they are saying he did, then I wanted to go to sleep at night and feel safe,” she said of the decision to turn him over to the police, telling them later that Rose had asked her to recommend a good place where he could set fire to a vehicle, according to body camera footage.
She loaded Rose into her car and drove him to a Chevron gas station on South Tacoma Way, went inside and called the police. He was too high to resist.
“They snuck up on him,” she said. “He didn’t know it was coming.”
Tacoma officers remained with Rose, handcuffed in the backseat of a patrol car, trying to ask him about the drugs he was on. Rose didn't appear responsive.
“Smells weird,” one officer says.
“Smells like ammonia,” another says.
As Kitsap deputies led Rose away, one of the Tacoma officers called after them: “He’s high as s___.”
Rose’s attorney, Tom Weaver, said he was not prepared to comment on the facts of the case, but said what struck him was that Rose was so high on heroin and fentanyl he was refused booking at the Kitsap County Jail and had to be hospitalized first.
“Fentanyl has infected our community in ways I didn’t see coming,” Weaver said. “I lived through the meth epidemic, and I lived through the heroin epidemic, and the second meth epidemic and now we are in the fentanyl epidemic.”
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Tacoma police arrested and released a Kitsap murder suspect
