By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Five months after his teenage son killed four students at a western Washington high school, Raymond Lee Fryberg was arrested by federal authorities on a charge of unlawful possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, a crime that could put the 42-year-old man in prison.
UPDATE: Following a court appearance, Fryberg was released by U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Alice Theiler, on condition that he surrender his concealed pistol license, not possess firearms or ammunition, or be in homes where guns and ammunition are present, and he may not contact any witnesses in the case. He will be closely supervised during his release.
Fryberg’s son, Jaylen, 15, gunned down his cousin, Andrew Fryberg, and friends Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, Gia Soriano and Zoe Galasso, and seriously wounding Nate Hatch in the October 2014 tragedy. Jaylen then turned the gun on himself. The pistol was recovered at the scene by responding police officers.
But that handgun has become a piece of evidence not only in the school shooting, but in a case now pending against the elder Fryberg because he allegedly bought the gun while under a permanent protection order, and did not disclose his status on the federal Form 4473. Additional troubles may be on the horizon, because according to the federal complaint, Fryberg also bought four other guns from the same Cabela’s store over an 18-month period ending in July 2014.
One of the questions on the 4473 form specifically asks, “Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?” The complaint alleges that he marked “no” on the form “for each of the five firearms purchased at Cabela’s.”
According to the federal complaint, Fryberg was slapped with a temporary protection order originally in August 2002 by his then-girlfriend. A second temporary order was issued eight days later. In September of that year, the tribal court made the order permanent, the complaint said.
In September 2012, Fryberg entered a plea of “no contest” stemming from a charge in March 2012 that he had violated the order, the complaint said.
“The Tulalip Tribal Court sentenced Fryberg to a fine of $2,500 of which $2,300 was suspended, a jail term of 180 days which also was suspended, and placed on probation for 12 months,” the federal complaint noted. “Fryberg signed the Defendant’s Acknowledgement on the judgement and sentence, wherein he agreed to comply with all terms of the judgment and sentence, including probation and compliance with the Order for Protection.”
The bombshell development has rekindled frustration in Washington state’s Second Amendment community because it is widely believed that news coverage of the shooting, just ten days before voters passed Initiative 594, the 18-page gun control measure ostensibly aimed at mandating so-called “universal background checks” helped sway voters.
But it is now clear, gun rights activists contend, that even if the law had been in place at the time of the shooting, it would not have prevented the incident. The teen gunman could not legally possess the handgun, but took it from home to the school. His father, court documents allege, could also not legally own the pistol, but had it anyway because of what now appears to have been a failure by the Tulalip Tribal Court to notify the federal National Instant Check System (NICS) of the protection order.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Washington State-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, issued a scathing statement to the press, calling it a “fatal flaw” in the campaign to push background checks to the extreme.
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb
“Penalizing all law-abiding gun owners because a system is flawed does not prevent crime from happening, nor does it keep the wrong people from getting their hands on guns,” Gottlieb observed.
It does not appear that the NICS system failed, but that the tribal court failed to forward information to the system. That is because providing such information is apparently voluntary for the tribal court.
Stephen G. Fischer, Jr., chief of multimedia productions for the FBI’s CJIS division, told TGM via e-mail how background checks are conducted on gun buyers in the Evergreen State.
“The state of Washington serves as a partial point-of-contact (POC) state for the NICS,” Fischer explained. “Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) in the state of Washington contact the appropriate local/state agency for some handgun transactions and the FBI for the remaining.”
He said more than 400 law enforcement agencies have access to NICS, and that NICS “conducts background checks for (Washington) FFLs on all initiated long gun transfers and all FFL initiated handgun transfers when the transferee possesses a Washington Concealed Pistol License (CPL.)”
“The only firearm purchase checks the local law enforcement agencies in (Washington) are responsible for conducting are handgun background checks when the individual does not possess a valid CPL,” Fischer explained. “The local agencies are contacted by an FFL when a resident of their jurisdiction goes to an FFL to purchase a handgun without a CPL. The local agency will receive a copy of the Application to Transfer a Pistol via fax, mail, or hand delivery from the FFL and thereafter conducts the NICS check. Per state law, there is a (five) day wait period for handguns transferred without a CPL.”
In this case, not only was the information about Fryberg’s protection order not sent to NICS, it apparently also was not provided to Washington law enforcement agencies.
The Everett Herald reported that, “Neither records of Fryberg’s 2002 court order, nor his violation of that court order in 2012, are found in the Washington Crime Information Center or National Crime Information Center databases, according to Heather Anderson, a manager with the Washington State Patrol’s criminal records division.”
“If the information is not provided to the NICS databases,” the FBI’s Fischer advised, “a NICS background check would not ‘hit’ against it. But remember, provision of such data is done on a voluntary basis.”
The Seattle Times and Associated Press quoted State Sen. John McCoy, a member of the Tulalip Tribes, who said he “didn’t know Fryberg had been subject to a restraining order.”
“That’s exceptionally troublesome to me,” McCoy reportedly stated. “It points me to the issue we’ve been arguing about in the state, that people are not going to tell the truth when they fill out the forms to buy a gun, so maybe we should have a registry of people who are subject to these orders. That’ll be more fodder for discussion.”
