EVERETT — The last time local police caught up with fugitive murder suspect Anthony Garver, it was a case of working the streets and homeless camps long and hard to develop leads.
Garver, 28, who lives with schizophrenia, and another man with local ties escaped from Western State Hospital in Pierce County on Wednesday. The second man, 58, was arrested Thursday morning.
Garver, who is accused of killing a 20-year-old Lake Stevens woman in 2013, stopped at his parents’ Spokane-area home on Thursday. KHQ-TV reported that his mother called 911 when she saw him. The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office says deputies are working with U.S. marshals and others to find Garver.
Police say he was observed buying a Greyhound bus ticket around 8:50 p.m. Wednesday. By late Thursday, a search was under way in a heavily-wooded area in Spokane’s East Valley using a SWAT team, police dogs and helicopters, The Associated Press reported.
Authorities said they had received information that Garver may have hidden a cache of weapons in the area. Sheriff’s deputy Mark Gregory said Friday he doesn’t know if Garver has left the area or is hiding in the woods.
Before his 2013 arrest in Everett, Garver was described as a survivalist capable of living off the grid and reportedly claimed connections to anarchist and domestic-terrorism causes.
That year, Garver vowed in an email to his mother that he would never go back to prison.
The Snohomish County Violent Offenders Task Force, working with the sheriff’s office Major Crimes Unit, tracked him down at a McDonald’s more than two weeks after Phillipa Evans-Lopez was stabbed two dozen times. Her throat had been cut. Genetic material collected from the crime scene, including that found on an electrical cord, reportedly matched a sample taken from Garver.
The tip that led to Garver’s capture came when a sheriff’s deputy working for the task force approached a teen with a skateboard on a street in north Everett. The sheriff’s deputy showed the teen a photo. The boy said he’d seen Garver and described black clothing and a camouflage backpack he was believed to be carrying. The deputy told the teen he could earn some money if he could provide a location for the fugitive.
Forty minutes later, the teen called. The task force found Garver inside a McDonald’s in north Everett, hunched over a laptop with buds in his ears. He was far from the wooded wilderness where some federal officials thought he might be hiding. In his backpack, detectives found a blood-stained folding knife.
Before his escape Wednesday, Garver had been at Western State Hospital for more than a year. He was deemed unfit last year to stand trial on the murder charge because of his mental problems.
In the past, he’s threatened to kill judges and prosecutors. During a 2013 bail hearing after his arrest in the killing, then-Everett District Court Judge Roger Fisher described Garver as “scary, to say the least.”
Garver is white, 5-foot-8 and 250 pounds. The brown-haired man is accused of repeatedly stabbing Evans-Lopez. The young mother was found June 17, 2013, bound to a bed in her Lake Stevens rental home. They’d been strangers. Surveillance footage from a fast-food restaurant showed them talking a few days before her body was found.
Garver had been released from federal prison months before the 2013 killing after serving time for threatening to blow up a government building in Spokane. He’d lived in Eastern Washington before turning up in Snohomish County.
In a report from last June, Western State staff reported: “Mr. Garver’s self report and records indicate he is currently displaying symptoms of paranoia, auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, delusional thinking, thought blocking and poor insight and judgement into his mental illness and current legal situation.”
Garver was 13 when he was first hospitalized for mental issues and he has been involuntarily committed several time since.
The other Western State Hospital escapee, who was being treated for mental illness under court commitment, was Mark Alexander Adams, 58. Adams was caught without incident Thursday morning in Des Moines.
Adams was arrested for domestic assault in 2014 but also was found not competent for trial. He has ties to Snohomish County and the Oak Harbor area on Whidbey Island.
Lakewood police reported that a bus driver picked up a man he believed was Garver around 6 p.m. Wednesday. A couple of hours later, he picked up a man he believed was Adams. The driver told authorities Adams was interested in going to SeaTac. He got on a bus from Lakewood to the Federal Way Transit Center, where he arrived around 10:30 p.m. and inquired about how to get to the airport.
Adams has a history of police contacts on Whidbey Island going back to 2001. He was last arrested there in June 2015 for violating a court order to stay away from his mother and other relatives on the north end of the island, said Ed Wallace, a detective with the Island County Sheriff’s Office. Adams showed up at the family’s house in February 2015 claiming he didn’t know his mother was there.
“He would apparently constantly violate (the order),” Wallace said.
In April and May 2014, Adams generated at least seven 911 calls from people worried about his mental health, Wallace said. During that time, a woman complained he was threatening her. She had met him playing pool, gave him her number and he called her repeatedly, ranting and saying bizarre things, Wallace said.
Adams is flagged in Island County as needing two officers for any contact because of his known mental health issues and combativeness.
He was charged with assault in 2014 in Snohomish County Superior Court. In that case, he told a relative that he was the “Supreme Allied Commander” before choking her and throwing her to the floor. He then ran from the home and jumped into Martha Lake.
Last year, he told Western State officials: “The only thing you need to know is I am the King of Monaco.” He requested that they contact the State Department to confirm his blood line because he was being held against his will.
Western State Hospital is run by the state Department of Social and health Services. The agency Thursday released a statement saying that it is believed the pair escaped by tampering with bolts on a locked window. The state said it is unaware of any other similar incidents.
“The hospital is undergoing a complete safety review and plan(s) to bring in outside experts to go through our facility,” said Carla Reyes, assistant director for the state’s Behavioral Health Administration. “We can never have too many fresh eyes reviewing a situation as serious as this.”
Western State Hospital has been plagued by problems. The federal government has threatened to pull funding if the state didn’t make sweeping safety improvements and other changes at the hospital.
The hospital also remains under a federal court mandate to reduce wait times for mentally ill inmates awaiting competency restoration treatment. The hospital failed meet its deadline last year and asked for more time to open additional beds in its forensic unit.
Lawmakers approved spending more than $40 million to meet the federal mandate.
The Associated Press contributed to this story. Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.
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