Kent Police are looking into the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy last month near West Meeker Street as an apparent gang-related dispute.<\/p>\n
Roberto Matamoros-Izaguirre died at the scene from a gunshot wound, according to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. Matamoros-Izaguirre attended Kent-Meridian High School until he withdrew in February 2016, according to an email from Principal Wade Barringer.<\/p>\n
Police are still looking for the suspects in the 12:16 a.m. April 18 shooting near a service station at West Meeker Street and 64th Avenue <\/a>South<\/a>. The shooters also injured a 16-year-old boy.<\/p>\n “Two (teens) are in the alley way behind the 76 station hanging out having a smoke,” Assistant Chief Rafael Padilla said during an update about the shooting at a community forum April 26 to address recent teen shootings. “Three unknown subjects come through the fence line that leads to the Bonel trailer park – they call it the cut – say something to the effect of ‘what’s up, homie?’ and they open fire. The first juvenile that gets shot, gets hit in the back, the neck, and a bullet goes through the top his skull and he lives. The second unfortunately does not survive his injures and dies right there at the scene.”<\/p>\n The injured 16-year-old had been involved in another shooting the previous week, Padilla said. He was not injured in the first shooting but his friend was.<\/p>\n At about 7:25 p.m. on April 9, the boys were walking near Madison Street and West Smith Street in downtown Kent, when they decided to use the portable toilet at a nearby park.<\/p>\n “They come out of the porta-potties, they hear gunshots and one of them gets hit in the leg,” Padilla said.<\/p>\n So far, police have few leads in the April 9 case.<\/p>\n “There’s no information in terms of suspects seen, different descriptions of what type of car,” Padilla said. “We canvass the area. We look for casings. There wasn’t a lot that came out of that. There isn’t a lot that came out in the particular investigation.”<\/p>\n Both shootings appear to be gang related, Padilla said.<\/p>\n “Each of them mentions beefs with other gangs,” Padilla said. “Unfortunately, what is similar is we are not getting a lot of information, and we’re not getting a lot of cooperation. We desperately want to solve these crimes. We desperately want to bring justice for the victims and the families, but we can’t do it alone. … We really want to be a part of the solution but we need some help.”<\/p>\n Reporter Heidi Sanders contributed to this article.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kent Police are looking into the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy last month near West Meeker Street as an apparent gang-related dispute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":28108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28107"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}