Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Utah woman killed reported relentless stalking

Sandy

Scott G Winterton / The Deseret News via AP

This June 6, 2017, file photo, crime scene investigators begin their work as Sandy police investigate a fatal shooting in a Salt Lake City suburb in Sandy, Utah. Police documents obtained by The Associated Press say a Utah woman fatally shot this month along with one of her sons had reported being relentlessly stalked by the man. The documents released Tuesday, June 13, 2017, also disclose that Memorez Rackley and Jeremy Patterson had previously been in a romantic relationship.

Updated Tuesday, June 13, 2017 | 6:40 p.m.

SANDY, Utah — Three days before she and her son were killed by her ex-boyfriend in a shooting this month that also injured two children, a Utah woman made a desperate middle-of-the-night call to tell police she was terrified he would hunt her down.

"It's just continual, he won't stop, and it's gotten to the point where he's threatened me, he's threatened the safety of my children and I don't know what to do," Memorez Rackley told a police dispatcher, according to a recording of a 911 call released Tuesday in response to a public records request by The Associated Press.

Officers talked to Jeremy Patterson, 32, but he told police he'd just been worried after their breakup and he was not arrested after he agreed to stop contacting her. Rackley did not want to press charges, said Sgt. Jason Nielsen of the police department in Sandy, a Salt Lake City suburb.

"We did what she asked us to do," Nielsen said. "If I had a crystal ball I would have been pounding on her door."

Rackley initially told police in her call to them on a Saturday she did not want officers to go to his house because she thought doing so could provoke him.

"I worry if they go knock on his door he's going to come hunt me and my kids down," Rackley told the 911 dispatcher.

She told police she would seek a protective order in court against Patterson Monday morning, but records show no request filed by her in any Salt Lake City area courts that day or on Tuesday, June 6 — when police say Patterson shot her before killing himself.

Rackley, 39, was walking her two sons home from their elementary school when she encountered Patterson and an argument started, police have said.

An unidentified woman driving by with her daughter and two other children in her sports utility vehicle saw Rackley and stopped to help.

Rackley and her two sons got inside and drove away but Patterson followed them in his pickup truck and used it to ram the SUV a couple blocks away, police have reported.

He then got out and opened fire. Rackley and her 6-year-old son Jase were killed. Her 11-year-old son Myles was critically wounded and the daughter of the driver was shot in the leg. Patterson then fatally shot himself, police said.

More than a dozen people called 911 to report the shooting, illustrating the panic that spread through the neighborhood as parents were picking up children from a nearby elementary school at the end of the day.

In the days since his shooting, Myles Rackley's condition has been upgraded and he is talking and getting stronger, family spokesman Jeff White said in a statement.

Authorities have not said how Patterson ended up near the elementary school in Sandy.

But Rackley told police on June 3 he had followed her nearly an hour while she was driving, threatened her repeatedly and appeared at her nail salon appointment to confront her about their breakup, according to the documents released in response to a public records request.

She asked police to contact Patterson after he followed a friend of hers as the woman went home from work, the documents said. She also reported to police Patterson had told her he had guns.

Patterson, who worked at an auto dealership and lived in Draper, a city adjacent to Sandy, told the officer he was concerned when she did not respond to his messages and said he would stop calling and texting her, the report said.

Rackley was married to another man who was the father of her children. She said in the 911 call that she was living alone with her children.

Friends of Rackley and her husband have said that they were separated but that both showed up to attend a son's soccer games.