Shooting victim's family: 'He was trying to be the peacemaker'

The King County Medical Examiner identified he victims as 30-year-old Justin Cunningham and 33-year-old Yang Keopraseurt.

"It's just hard to watch your family go through this," said Yang Keoprasert's stepsister Sakorn Keopanya. "To see the heart break of everybody. His family. His friends. It's just not right."

Meanwhile, Justin Cunningham's brother Heath said the extent of their loss is undescribable.

"I couldn't have asked for a better brother. No one could, he was jolly but disciplined at the same time," Heath Cunningham said.

Investigators said the groups - which included more than 40 people, mostly of Asian descent - were having separate picnics near to each other at the park when someone in one group started taunting someone in the other group.

A person with Keopraseurt's group, who did not want to be identified, told KOMO News the other group picked a fight and his gang defended themselves.

"We wasn't (sic) the aggressor," the person said. "We will defend ourselves... We only did what we did to protect our family."

The verbal altercation turned into a fistfight between two or more people, then someone fired a gun into the air to break it up.

At that point, several people pulled out guns and started firing, said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff's Department.

Keopanya doesn't know what the two groups were fighting about, but said Keopraseurt was trying to break up the fight when people started shooting.

More than 20 shots were fired, and Keopraseurt was fatally wounded. Another man, a 30-year-old from Seattle, was also killed.

"He was trying to be the peacemaker," Keopanya said. "And in the end he was the one that was shot."

Relatives said Keopraseurt was a proud husband and father of three young girls and a boy.

Officials said both groups involved in the shooting have gang affiliations, and a police source said Keopraseurt was a possible gang member. But Keopraseurt's friends and family deny it.

"He was a changed person. He was a good person," Keopanya said. "If you were around him you would laugh. There was no reason for any of this."

Justin Cunningham

Heath Cunningham denied his brother was in a gang.

"Most certainly not," he said. "He had no gang affiliation, nor was he ever interested in being initiated in any gang of any sort."

Six people were arrested Saturday night after the shootings, but five of them had to be released due to a lack of evidence to hold them in jail. The sixth suspect is being held on an unrelated charge.

"We've got several people we are kind of interested in," said John Urquhart with the King County Sheriff's Department. "We've got two people who have died of course. We've got to figure out exactly what their role was in this shooting."

The park was locked down after the shootings, and detectives spent Sunday collecting evidence and searching for weapons that may have been left behind.

So far, four guns have been recovered - two in a car, one next to a body and one tossed into some brush at the shooting scene near the beach.

The park re-opened at 6:30 a.m. on Monday.