Motorcycle club under scrutiny after Tacoma homicides

TACOMA, Wash. -- Underneath a broken street light, outside a gray Tacoma warehouse, Bruce "Deymon" Price took his last few breaths.

"I heard about four to five gunshots," said Anton Hassan, who lives nearby. "Heard tires screeching. People were driving left and right. It was pretty intense."

Strangers tried to save Price, Hassan said, but bullets won out in the end.

"(My neighbor) went over there and tried to revive him, tried to give him CPR," he said. "It was a pretty intense moment."

Detectives say Price had attended an "after hours" party early Sunday morning near 23rd Street and S. Fawcett Avenue when a fight erupted into gunfire. Price's family says the 40-year old father of three may have tried to intervene when someone hurt a person in a wheelchair.

Investigators are now looking into the motorcycle club that hosted the party this weekend and whether their activities are legal, said Mark Fulghum, spokesman for the Tacoma Police Department.

Police have also linked a second, unsolved homicide - from September 2011 - to the same biker club.

"It is a big concern. Very similar circumstances; unfortunately, very similar results from both of them," Fulghum said.

Investigators are still searching for whoever gunned down 17-year old Billy Ray Shirley, a local high school student and neighborhood volunteer, in August. Shirley had gone to a party to check on a friend that day when a fight broke out, shots were fired, and he was killed.

Shirley's killer has never been caught.

"It's very frustrating," said Shirley's mother, Shalisa Hayes. "It's beyond frustrating, because when you hear about how many people there, how many adults were there, and everybody's saying, 'I didn't see anything.'"

Hayes said Sunday morning's homicide - under similar circumstances, at a party hosted by the same motorcycle club - proves that something needs to be done.

"(I'm) sick to my stomach," she said. "One life is not better than the other. Even though this was an adult who lost his life, it's still a life. What it tells me is that this group that's holding these parties needs to step it up a bit when it comes to their security and who they're allowing to these parties and doing whatever they can do to ensure that this doesn't happen."

Fulghum said police are looking into whether the parties hosted by the motorcycle club are allowed under the law.

"One of the things we're looking at is: how legal are the get-togethers? What we can do maybe to prevent this from happening in the future," he said. "If we can't prevent the parties maybe we can stop any more homicides or shootings from happening at them."

Price, who died Sunday morning, leaves behind a large family, including three kids.

"He wasn't a violent person," said Price's brother, Dennis. "He was a peaceful person. He loved his family."

"He was a changed person," Dennis added, acknowledging his brother had a criminal past. "There's a mom somewhere that lost a child. There's a sister or brother somewhere that lost their sibling yesterday," Hayes said. "There's a cousin. There's a grandmother. There's probably kids that lost a father. I hope somebody steps forward this time and says something."

Hayes has started a foundation in her son's memory, hoping to get a community center built in their neighborhood. It would fulfill her son's dream, she said.

KOMO News was unable to reach the motorcycle club for comment.