Deadly gunfire in Tacoma led to trial, then a successful appeal. Now 1 pleads guilty

A 32-year-old man whose murder conviction for a fatal shooting in Tacoma was overturned earlier this year due to a flawed jury instruction pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree manslaughter and other offenses.

Germi Rashad Zeigler admitted to recklessly causing the death of 37-year-old Ozelle Tyrece Tate on March 11, 2020, during an argument between the two men in an alley behind an apartment in the city's Hilltop neighborhood.

He also pleaded guilty to second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm and three counts of tampering with a witness, according to Pierce County Superior Court records. He is to be sentenced Dec. 6. Records show that prosecutors have agreed to recommend a punishment of 18 years in prison, seven years fewer than the sentence Zeigler received in January 2022 for his second-degree murder conviction.

After a three-judge panel of the Washington State Court of Appeals vacated that conviction April 16 , Zeigler was set to have a new trial on the murder charge that began Tuesday.

Records show Zeigler opted to plead guilty shortly after the case was called Tuesday morning. The defendant's attorney, Warren Corey-Boule, declined to comment on his client's reason for doing so in a brief phone call with The News Tribune.

Court records show prosecutors were prepared to proceed to trial on more serious charges than they first leveled against Zeigler, accusing him of first-degree murder along with other offenses.

Zeigler's murder conviction in his first trial was thrown out because the appeals court found that an instruction jurors received before they went into deliberations lacked a relevant statement — that words alone cannot make a defendant the first aggressor.

The defendant argued that the shooting was a case of self-defense in his first trial, and jurors were given instructions on self-defense and first aggressor. According to the unpublished opinion authored by Judge Bradley Maxa, the first-aggressor instruction stated that if Zeigler's acts and conduct provoked the fight that created the need to defend himself, then self-defense was not an available defense.

"We hold that the trial court erred in giving the first aggressor jury instruction without also instructing the jury that words alone are not adequate provocation to make a defendant the first aggressor in an altercation," the opinion states.

Maxa wrote that Zeigler's words were a significant portion of his altercation with Tate. In an analysis of the evidence that supported giving jurors the first-aggressor instruction, the judge said the question at hand was whether Zeigler's acts, as opposed to his words, provoked a need for self-defense.

In the appeals court's recounting of the shooting, Tate was sitting in the passenger's seat of a car when Zeigler, who had an issue with Tate, walked up to him while holding a gun in his hoodie pocket.

Zeigler stood over Tate, less than a foot away, and yelled, "I'm a real gangster," and, "You've been disrespecting me," several times. According to the testimony of Tate's girlfriend, Tate said he didn't have a problem and told Zeigler to back up. Tate had his hands up at one point, was shaking and looked scared.

The defendant claimed it looked like Tate was reaching for a gun, so he instinctively fired two shots at Tate. A witness testified that Zeigler then ran back to his car and drove off. He fled the state and was arrested in Macon, Georgia.

Tate was found by a Tacoma Police Department officer lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to his upper leg, according to charging papers. He was transported to a hospital, where he died of blood loss.

Prosecutors argued that the aggressive act that provoked Zeigler's need for self-defense was him pulling out his gun and aiming it at Tate before shooting him, according to Maxa. But neither of two witnesses stated that they saw a gun before shots were fired. Maxa said prosecutors' recitation of the evidence wasn't supported by the evidence.

The appeals court did find that other evidence cited by prosecutors sufficiently supported a finding that Zeigler's conduct and words were reasonably likely to provoke a belligerent response, so the trial court was right to give the first-aggressor instruction, denying Zeigler's alternative claim that the instruction should not have been given at all.