Original subtitles

It came out over the radio--

a big, serious police call comes out.

She wins a number of military honors

and distinctions when she is in Iraq.

He was watching her.

It initially sounded like perhaps a school shooting.

You immediately assume the worst.

I want you to run, and I want you to hide.

We could hear that there was a police chase going on.

He was a terrorist.

He terrorized her.

And she kept repeating, "He's going to kill me."

And he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run. You can't hide.

Every time I drive by this school,

I think about what happened on that November afternoon.

It's something that sticks with you.

Well, it's going to stick with me

for the rest of my life.

It was a Tuesday afternoon in the newsroom.

Most people were working on stories

for the next day's paper

when our police scanner really started to go off,

showing that there was something major was going on.

We could hear something about a shooting at a school.

You immediately assume the worst.

And then we could hear that there was

a police chase going on.

The school where the shooting occurred

was Sarah J. Anderson Elementary School.

It's about 5 miles north of the Vancouver city limits.

I was actually quite familiar with it

because I lived for a dozen years

within walking distance of the school.

I might have even been the first reporter

who was on the scene.

The police had already cordoned off the parking lot.

The car was probably 15 or 20 feet away

from where I was.

I could see the smashed driver's side window,

and I believe there was some glass on the ground too.

It wasn't until I could see some of the photographs

that one of our photographers took of the minivan,

and that was the first time that I could see

four bullet holes clearly in the windshield.

It was a little bit of a chilling moment.

It really hit home, and you could see

that something terrible had happened indeed.

Tiffany was the nicest, kindest,

magnificent person ever.

We met at a Grow and Learn event

that they do at the schools.

You take your little kids that aren't in school yet,

and they read stories.

And she was new, and it was like an instant thing.

She kind of just started saddling up to me,

and we just got to talking.

And from that moment on, it was like we'd

always known each other.

I'm a teacher.

I met Tiffany through my school's PTA.

She was the co-president, and I was treasurer,

and that's where our friendship grew.

She was very, very go-getting.

Like, she was very determined, very caring,

very compassionate towards kids, towards our school,

towards her own kids.

I mean, just she was a wonderful mother.

She was very protective of her kids.

It was perfect because she had three kids,

and I had three kids.

Every day, we texted.

Every day, we saw each other because our kids went

to the same school.

My daughter and her daughter were best friends.

Her and I started getting really close,

and we were, like, oh, my gosh, our husbands, well,

we think they'll really get along.

My wife and Tiffany became fast friends.

And she told me, hey, we got invited

to their daughter's birthday party.

Turns out I did actually like her husband quite a bit.

Him and I got along instantly.

We just became friends.

He was a bowler.

He was on, like, a bowling league,

and I joined the league with him.

Keland Hill moved his family across the country,

out here to Washington State.

He got a job at a subsidiary of Boeing Company

that manufactures military drones.

We were each other's emergency contacts.

So if her kids were sick and I was closer,

I would just go and pick them up

and take them home and vice versa.

And Keland was also on our emergency contact as well

to pick up our kids as needed.

Everybody loved Keland.

Everybody that knew him liked him.

He was vivacious.

He was fun.

He was extremely personable and kind of,

like, made you feel at ease, very hospitable and generous.

You know, he was handsome.

You know, he could woo you in a minute.

Like, he was just funny.

You wanted to be around him.

Keland would be, like, hey, come over.

Let's have a barbecue.

And we'd show up, and Keland had went and bought

50 pounds of steak and ten bottles

of really expensive, like, alcohol.

People were, oh, gosh, he's a really great guy.

It was an intense love from the very beginning,

very codependent.

He would talk about their marriage in the sense of,

I just love her so much, and I just want to make her happy.

You can see that they were madly in love.

She needed him deeply.

But I knew all of their deep, dark secrets.

That day was her daughter's birthday

and my son's birthday.

Took my son to school, and then we took our daughters,

along with her mom.

We went to the movies, and we went and saw "Frozen 2."

And she saw me about to leave,

and she ran over and gave me a big hug.

And then I told her to call me in a little bit.

It was the end of the school day.

Tiffany and her mother arrived to get their three children.

It came out over the radio.

A big serious police call comes out,

active shooter situation.

I didn't hear any gunshots.

I just heard part of the lockdown procedure

go into place.

And I wasn't quite sure, like, is this real or not real?

We knew that the suspected shooter had fled the scene,

but the police were right on him.

They went through a high-speed chase

with speeds approaching 75 miles an hour.

He was running red lights.

Karina called me and said,

there's been a shooting at Sarah J.

Have you talked to Tiffany?

And I said, no.

I actually looked at my wife and said, it's Tiffany.

I know it's Tiffany, and I know she's dead.

I saw Tiffany's mom in the nurse's station,

and she was bleeding.

And our school nurse was trying to calm her down

and figure out where the bleeding was coming from.

I asked, where's Tiffany?

Where's the kids?

And another staff person told me that she was shot.

At the hospital, I arrived.

They had just declared Tiffany dead.

And that's when we got one of our first big tips

that the shooter in this case had just gotten out

of jail a few days earlier.

At this hour, American and Coalition forces are

in the early stages of military operations

to disarm Iraq, to free its people,

and to defend the world from grave danger.

In 2005, Tiffany Hill joins the Marines.

She is deployed to Iraq.

If you know anything about Marines,

they pride themselves on their toughness.

They pride themselves on their ability.

It is a brotherhood and a sisterhood.

And she rose to the rank of sergeant in the Marines.

That is where she meets her future husband, Keland Hill.

He was in logistics in the Marines.

He would talk about how they dated in Iraq.

She said it was really intense when you're overseas.

We had thousands of people coming back from Iraq,

some with horrific physical wounds,

other with emotional and mental wounds.

It's not an experience that most people care to relive.

It leaves a lasting mark.

And she was actually his boss.

I mean, they would work like 24-hour shifts,

and it just blossomed.

It happened very-- it was very short, you know,

that it happened.

And all of a sudden, they started dating.

She wins a number of military honors and distinctions

when she is in Iraq.

She suffers some type of injury

and is honorably discharged from the Marine Corps.

Shortly thereafter, she marries Keland Hill.

And I think it was, they couldn't live together

when they were going to be coming back over here,

so they kind of rushed to get married.

That way they could live together right away.

And it was great.

It was fun.

It was carefree.

Everybody thought he was this great person.

And when the truth came out, everybody was shocked.

We went out to lunch one day, and the girls were playing.

And she just kind of very briefly had tossed out,

like, some bad times they'd had before,

times that she'd almost left him.

And I asked questions, and she would

just kind of slowly started spilling everything from there.

I think it was after they had their first kid.

He did not like the attention that she and the baby got.

Her life no longer revolved around him,

and I think he didn't like that.

That's what he wanted.

He wanted 1,000% of her all the time.

He was offered a job out here.

And he gave a really high amount of what he wanted

to be paid, and they gave that.

Tiffany did not want to come out here.

And, you know, she's--

she's a New Yorker.

You know, she's from Brooklyn.

Her family was back there.

She almost left him at that time

because she didn't want to come here.

But he convinced her that it was going

to be different out here.

Her thing was he moved her out here

to get her away from the support network that she had.

But for him, it was all sunshine and daisies.

You know, he moved out here to make

a better life for the family.

Outwardly, he seemed like a great father

because he had a really good job.

And he was able to buy nice things for his family.

And, you know, superficially, that's great.

But how you truly act as a person is, you know,

that's different.

You could tell there wasn't a closeness

that you can see in a lot of marriages.

There weren't like the little touches, the hand-holdings.

There weren't things like that.

Whenever he'd enter a room at any time,

she would automatically, like, stiffen.

Like, her shoulders would kind of go up a little bit.

The way he talked to her,

it wasn't behavior of a good spouse,

kind of degrading things.

Like, if she wore a nice outfit or something,

he would just talk down to her.

And, oh, what do you think you're so hot,

you can wear stuff like that?

And just kind of degrade her a little bit.

The marriage wasn't the way he wanted it to be.

He wanted, like, you know, a '50s-style marriage

where the woman stayed home and cooked

and did everything for him and serviced him at all times

and did what he said.

But Tiffany was an independent spirit,

and she was extremely active in her children's education

and was volunteering all the time for everything.

I mean, she just gave of herself constantly,

and so he'd be upset that she wasn't at home doing the dishes

or cleaning the house or have dinner ready

because she was so busy volunteering all the time.

And he was unfaithful in his marriage.

He would frequently leave the bowling alley when we were done

to go be with other women,

and he showed me the pictures to prove it.

It wasn't a "he said, she said" kind of thing.

I saw the pictures.

I saw the text messages.

That is when the darkness showed itself.

She told me that he was arrested

in North Carolina for strangling her.

It was right after they both got out of the military.

Basically, in a drunken rage,

he tried to choke the life out of her, literally.

And she managed to get out of the house

and got to a neighbor's house.

The police were called, and he was arrested.

Keland Hill is charged with attempted murder

by strangulation.

The charges are later dropped after Tiffany urges

the prosecutors to do so.

Then she said they moved to Maryland,

and he was abusive in Maryland.

She almost left him at that time too.

He convinced her.

She went back.

Once they moved to Vancouver,

Tiffany was away from family members.

She was away from her friends,

and apparently the abuse continued behind closed doors.

Keland would drink, and then he would go home and abuse her.

She was tired because he also was sleep-depriving her.

When she would sleep, he would turn on the TV

as loud in their bedroom.

He put water all over her side of the bed.

So when she'd get into bed, it would be soaking wet.

I wanted her to leave the very first time

she told me this was going on.

But he'd find her, no matter what she did or where she went.

That was her thing.

She was, like, he'll find me.

He will find a way to me.

He will break apart every friendship and relationship

that I have, and I will have to go back to him

because she'd always forgiven him.

He was working harder to bring her back in.

She was at the point now where she was, like,

pushing back for the first time.

Like, she's going through with this.

It was just a matter of finding the time

for her to just leave him.

On September 11th of 2019,

Tiffany suffers some serious injuries

after an altercation with Keland.

He apparently slammed her against the wall,

threw her out of the bedroom.

One of their children asked Google

or whatever, Amazon Echo, that they had to call Grandma.

They told Grandma what was happening,

and Grandma called 911 from a different state

because he had taken her phone, so she couldn't call 911.

The police came, and he was arrested.

It was later determined that she suffered a concussion

and whiplash from this attack.

He told me that Tiffany, when she got the concussion,

she took a dive.

You know, "I only touched her a little bit.

"She just took a dive.

And she's making all of this up,"

blaming everything on her.

She wasn't taking care of the kids,

and she wasn't taking care of me.

And she took a dive so that

I'd get arrested, you know.

Never minding the fact that there is

a medical doctor saying she has a concussion

with the report to back it up.

She was issued a restraining order

and a no contact.

Following the September 11th attack on Tiffany,

Keland Hill is released from jail,

but the abuse escalates and continues.

It didn't matter.

He was still texting her every day,

sending her Facebook messages.

He was stalking her.

I mean, I have hundreds of text messages,

his texts to her.

She was scared.

She was scared of what he could potentially do,

just because knowing that both of them

were in the military.

She was afraid as far as what he could do.

And then he tried to buy a gun.

We have an assembly at the school.

Tiffany gets a phone call.

She comes back out of the room that she was in.

She looked like a ghost.

And I said, what's going on?

And she said, I have to go meet my social worker.

He tried to buy a gun.

He had actually tried to purchase a gun

in a neighboring state, and he was red-flagged

and was not able to purchase the rifle.

Actually, the day that we found out

he had tried to buy a gun, we were driving

to see her social worker.

And all I could think of is, what if he's behind us,

and he shoves my car into the median on the freeway?

I mean, you know, it goes through your mind.

It really does because I think it's smart.

You have to be aware.

And it was a horrible day.

She was distraught.

That is the day that I think her soul died.

She was just a shell of a human.

She was so devastated that he had tried to buy a gun

and what that was going to mean to her.

We had one of our off-campus board meetings at a restaurant.

And we're all leaving, and I see this man walking up,

and he smiles at me.

And I think to myself, well, that looks like Keland.

And then I doubt myself.

Well, well, no, that's-- that's dumb.

And I see him walking, and then I start

hitting one of our other board members in the arm.

And I said, oh, he's not supposed to be here.

He can't be here.

And I hear Tiffany say, oh, my God.

And she starts running for the car.

Keland's yelling at her, "I just want to see my kids."

And then realizes, you know, we're all coming towards him.

Like, this is going to be us forming a circle, right,

around her, and he runs.

That was the first interaction

that I saw of her just shaking uncontrollably from fear.

I tell her, the only way for him to know that you're here,

because we're parked in the very back,

is he has to be following you or tracking you.

That is the only way.

This restaurant was-- the parking lot

was all the way in the back.

I mean, you would have never seen someone pull in and park.

He was watching her.

He was showing up at places that were too random.

It wasn't just, oh, gosh, what a weird--

you know, where we bump into each other.

No, these aren't places like he would go to.

Her life is falling apart.

You know, she couldn't go out to eat

because he would be there.

Tiffany always said, "The only way I'm going

"to get out of this is if he kills me.

It's going to happen. He's going to kill me."

I saw Tiffany's reaction when he walked into the restaurant

to pick up a to-go order.

And I stood up and stood between him and the kids,

even though they were about 15 feet apart.

And he turned around to say, oh, I'm sorry,

I didn't realize.

And I just told him, no, get out of here now.

There was no way that he would have known she was here

unless he was tracking her.

We didn't know how.

We didn't know if it was by her phone

or if there was something on her car.

But we just-- we knew that there was

some way of him tracking her.

Once they got a K-9 unit out there, we knew.

Police found the tracking device.

He had placed a GPS tracker on her car.

He is eventually rearrested and charged

with stalking and violation of a restraining order.

I am currently a detective in the Domestic Violence Unit

for Vancouver Police Department.

Tiffany came in to have a interview with the prosecutor.

While they were in that interview,

Tiffany reported additional violations

of the no contact order.

What Tiffany and I talked about was a brief history

of their relationship.

I went back and reviewed the police reports,

Keland's criminal history, so I was aware of some

of the things that had happened across the country

in prior arrests.

But we focused mainly on what was happening right then.

Some victims, we do have great concerns about their safety,

and Tiffany would be one.

Tiffany was very concerned that Keland was going to murder her.

We were very concerned about that, based on his behavior.

We use a Danger Assessment

that's essentially a lethality predictor for our victims.

She scored very high on that,

31 out of 41, which is an extreme risk category for us.

We were all very concerned about Tiffany's safety.

A lot of domestic violence offenders have

the mentality that if they can't have the victim

and the children, then no one can.

One of the analogies I like to use is that, you know,

if you filled a 737 with people and crashed it every month,

it still wouldn't equal the number

of domestic violence victims that are murdered

by their significant other every year.

We try to do more specific situational safety planning.

So with Tiffany, we had several measures in place.

One is we wanted her to, if possible,

go back with her family in New York.

That would have been, I think, the safest thing.

And her mother did fly out to kind of assist with that.

But Tiffany wanted the best for her children.

She didn't want to pull her children from school.

She didn't want to have to change their lives.

That's very understandable.

We talked about what was going on with the school.

The school, I know, had a security guard

that was specifically made aware of what was happening.

Her friends were aware of what's happening.

We talked about calling 911 immediately

and leaving the area immediately

and many other things.

But we did plan on, here are the things

that we need to do to try to keep you safe

because we know that he's out there

trying to purchase firearm.

I was at her house.

My spouse and I were helping

her change all the locks on the doors

and putting bars on the sliding glass door,

not knowing when he was going to get out of jail.

And she kept repeating, he's going to kill me.

He is going to kill me.

He'll find a way, and I'll be dead.

And it was heartbreaking.

It was awful.

I mean, how do you-- how do you help someone at that point?

The prosecutor asked for a very high bail

to try to keep Keland where she thought he belonged,

in custody, and requested a bail of $2 million.

She had hired a lawyer to advocate for her,

who told the judge he will kill her.

Tiffany is begging you.

He will kill her.

I stopped reporting because he's made aware of it

in my report, and I'm scared of his anger and retaliation.

Despite my non-report, he continued to escalate

because he feels he's smarter than everybody else,

and he's untouchable.

He is here now because he placed

a tracking device on my vehicle and tried to possess a weapon.

Those two things are major indicators

of what I've known all along deep down,

that he's going to kill me if he's given the opportunity.

I beg you to not allow him to get to me and my children.

I have no family here, nowhere to go.

We have no money and nowhere to hide from him.

He's made sure of that.

Thank you.

A judge will consider all types of information

when making a decision on bail.

A judge will look at criminal history.

A judge will look at whether the defendant

is gainfully employed.

The judge will also look, though,

at the seriousness of the offenses--

the fact that he had already been arrested,

the fact that he had tried to purchase a rifle,

the fact that he had placed a GPS tracker on her car.

The judge will look at all these factors

and apply the law to the best that he or she can.

The judge takes this all into consideration

and raises his bail from $75,000 to $250,000.

The prosecutor asked for electronic monitoring

of the defendant.

The judge, you know, took that into consideration,

decided against it.

The result was that Keland Hill was able

to make bail and get out in the street.

Just in case if Keland showed up,

we'd been practicing lockdowns at the school.

They were prepared.

There were, you know, security guards at the school every day.

If Keland showed up, doors locked.

They hit the button.

Classrooms lock. Everything locks.

I think the hardest part for me was being at the school

and walking out to my car with Tiffany and the kids

because I never tried to let her walk out by herself.

But having to tell my 10-year-old,

if you see the kids' dad, and I tell you to run,

I want you to run, and I want you to hide.

And I don't want you to come find me.

I don't want you to look back.

I don't want you to come for me.

I want you to find a safe place.

And that-- that was heartbreaking.

I mean, she's text messaged me several times.

"I know Keland will kill me if he sees me."

It was late afternoon.

Most of the children had already left the school.

Keland arrived in the school parking lot.

He parked kind of on the end of the parking lot,

away from the view of Tiffany's vehicle.

She was there with her mother.

They had picked up their three children.

They were all in the minivan,

when Keland apparently had been

waiting for this very moment, appeared.

He pulled out of his parking spot,

pulled up in front of Tiffany's vehicle.

So he was parked kind of perpendicular to her vehicle.

Keland had gone up with his car in front of her van

so she couldn't back out

and then went around the front--

or knocked on the window first.

Keland flipped off Tiffany and then walked back to his car,

and then he came back around.

Pulled out a gun and cold-bloodedly shot

four times through the windshield.

He was shooting into a car with his kids in the back seat.

Tiffany's mom leaned over and did the thing that they do,

you know, instinctual reaching out

to try to protect her daughter.

And she was shot in her arms and her hands.

And then Keland had some kind of a malfunction

with his firearm, it appears.

Went back to his car trunk and appeared to reload

or clear his malfunction, came to the driver's side,

and fired a couple additional rounds.

Then got into his car and fled.

And then I think their teacher or a crossing guard

was walking by and heard what happened.

I think they ran to the van and got the kids out

and shuttled them inside and locked the--

locked the school down from there.

Clark County deputies were actually executing a warrant

just a few blocks away.

So when the call came out, they left the scene of the warrant.

And I believe he probably heard the sirens.

So they were right on him as he was leaving.

He had just committed a brutal crime

and was trying to flee the scene.

The police went through a high-speed chase

with speeds approaching 75 miles an hour.

He was running red lights, endangering other people.

The deputies actually attempted to stop his vehicle

by ramming it with theirs and pursued him

until he got caught in traffic.

And that's when Keland exited the vehicle,

turned to face the oncoming officers,

and shot himself.

He was a selfish person.

If he didn't get it his way, then,

you know, the world was not right.

Rather than make it work with his wife,

he took the coward's way out.

We were with the kids.

The kids were the priority.

I hadn't heard anything about Keland yet.

I didn't know anything that had happened yet.

Priority was that it was their youngest daughter's birthday.

It was her sixth birthday.

I mean, so we stayed with them in a locked classroom.

A cake was brought in.

Pizza, we enjoyed ourselves.

We smiled. We laughed.

We made it as great as we could because we all knew deep down

that her birthday was never going to be the same

for the rest of her life.

The kids had no idea what was going on.

They saw their mother get shot,

but they didn't know she was dead.

And then when we found out, they just told me,

don't say anything yet.

We're going to wait till after the cake.

And then a police officer came in.

We were with the children when--

when the sheriff told them that their father

had killed their mother and then killed himself.

You know, I believe if Keland's gun

hadn't malfunctioned, we wouldn't have

those children with us today.

He clearly was not concerned for their safety.

And that's a very common thing, is that the offender will kill

everyone else in the family.

Perhaps if Clark County hadn't been so close

and he had more time, we don't know what he would have done.

So I'm certainly grateful that they were there

because I believe they saved those children's lives.

This is where she was shot, and her mother was also shot.

Her minivan would have been parked right in that area too.

And on the side, on the driver's side,

you could clearly see the glass.

My understanding is her children were moved back

to the New York area, so they could spend time

with their grandmother.

This has been something that has traumatized them

and will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

I was watching television,

and I saw the police report on the news.

And, of course, when I saw that, it broke my heart.

For a period of a month, he had violated

domestic violence protection orders 64 times.

A piece of paper, a protective order--

a piece of paper don't protect the domestic violence victims.

I started contacting the detective, Tanya,

and the prosecuting attorney.

And I told them that I would like to honor Tiffany

in a way that would help others.

Senator Wilson said, you know,

I'd really like to use Tiffany's name

for this act we're trying to pass to become a law.

You know, do you want to be a part of it?

And I said, of course, I do, absolutely.

The gist of it is for victims of domestic violence

that can get electronic monitoring on their abuser.

And then if the abuser gets too close,

then they will get an alert on their phone through an app.

Because so many times with domestic violence victims,

it's the element of surprise that takes them off-guard.

You know, if that bill had been around,

I believe that Tiffany would be alive today.

She would have known when he was lurking

because she would be notified on her smartwatch or phone.

Various people who were friends with Tiffany Hill

came out and testified before the Senate.

Their testimony was amazing.

It was so heartfelt, and you could tell

the love that they had for Tiffany and her children.

All those in favor of adoption

of the proposed substitute, please say aye.

- Aye. - Aye.

All those opposed say no.

The proposed substitute is adopted.

We put it on the front page of our paper,

and I believe it was on the front page

when the bill finally passed

and was signed into law by the governor.

I think it's going to do a lot of good.

A piece of paper don't protect domestic violence victims

or assault victims the way that this technology can.

The law was renamed the Tiffany Hill Act for a reason.

It recognized how the system had failed

Tiffany Hill and took one small incremental step

to hopefully preventing future tragedies like this.

It should be nationwide.

We're going to keep working on it

and seeing how far we can go with this.

Make her proud.

There's other people who are living the same hell she lived.

And those are the people that we need

to be concerned about now.

The judge later said that he felt horrible about this.

And, obviously, who would not feel horrible?

He let out a monster who killed his wife

in front of their three children.

It's very clear the system failed Tiffany Hill.

All the warning signs were here.

This was an avoidable tragedy.

She was a magnificent mother.

Everything she did was for her kids.

There isn't a day goes by that I don't think about that.

Every day, I think about her.

But it can happen to anybody.

Anybody can--this can happen, male, female.

You know, we need to learn to believe women

when women say we're being hurt.

This is happening.

This was a flirtatious woman who was used

to getting her way with men.

She says that her and her husband entered into this pact

on their marriage night.

They agreed that if either of them ever cheated,

they got to kill that person.