A Brother Betrayed: Part 2

It’s been 49 days since Josh Blake, 28, before turning the gun on himself in one of the most tragic and widely reported crimes this year. Blake, reportedly high on methamphetamine, shot Trooper Tony Radulescu during a routine traffic stop in Port Orchard. 

Surrounded by law enforcement after an intense police manhunt that ended in a decrepit trailer in the woods, Blake put a gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

Now Chris Blake, a Bonney Lake city employee, Sumner resident and Josh's younger brother, shares some insight into his brother's life and death in an exclusive interview with Patch. In Part 1, Chris talked about his brother's personality, childhood and his adult struggle with drugs.

Today, he discusses the day that changed everything.

Here is part two of Patch’s conversation with Chris Blake, edited for length and clarity.

Let’s go to that day, the day you found out that your brother shot a trooper. What was happening at the time?

At 4 a.m. that morning my mom called me and told me to turn on the news–that my brother had shot a state trooper.

I thought my mom was going to say that he was back in jail or dead. We turned on the news and by that time they had found the truck. It’s an unmistakable-looking truck. It had a lot of dents and a piece of the grill was missing. It had a back window broken out, no tailgate. There was no other truck in the world that looks like that so I knew it was definitely him.

We watched most of it on the news like everyone else. We got more from the news than we did from the police or hospital. There were a lot of reports that he was still alive after he shot himself so we were trying to see if there was anything we could do or if we could see him before he died.  

What do you know about the people he was with and who helped him escape from the police?

The girl in the truck with him was one of his best friends’ little sister. I knew his ex-girlfriend Jessie, of course, she is the mother of his daughter, but I didn’t recognize the other people in the pictures. I don’t know who those people are. My brother protected his family from his life–we didn’t know the people he was associated with. So, I don’t know if they were involved with drugs, or people he met recently or what. I’m sure he thought he could go hide with them because they were probably other people who were on drugs.

I so wish my brother would have called me that night, but he didn’t. Those people are the last ones who were close to him–they have those very last memories of him.

What do you think was going through his mind that day?

He was a pretty crazy guy but he wasn’t “kill a cop” crazy, it’s almost unthinkable.

But, Josh had a problem with drugs. I guess the girl in the truck with him is admitting that they were high on meth and drunk, which isn’t surprising. You’d have to look out for him when he was on drugs, because he was not Josh.

I think once he realized what he did, he knew there was no turning back. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison. It doesn’t matter how messed up he was at the time–when you come to, how would you live with yourself for doing something like that?

I hate to say it, but I’m glad he did that instead of having a shootout with the police and hurt more people. I would have rather he laid down his gun and went to prison for the rest of his life.

What do you think of Jessie? She is the mother of Josh’s daughter but also is on trial for helping him elude police.

It’s terrible, what happened to Jessie. I’m sure she was just trying to help. It wasn’t a very good idea, but what do you do when you’re put in that situation? She struggled with Josh outside the trailer and tried to wrestle the gun away from him before he killed himself. No one deserves to see something like that.

Her and Josh fought and it was always one saying the other was high on meth. While she was pregnant until their daughter was 2 or 3 months old, my brother was in jail. I know some of the stuff has come out that was in their custody battle, but I know Jessie made up a lot of that stuff about Josh in order to get custody. They would get so high on meth that they’d fight and didn’t know what they were fighting about. It was all drug-induced.

Had you ever seen the trailer your brother was found in when he died?

To be honest, that place looked like a meth lab. He rented a duplex in Gorst that was pretty decent. It wasn’t anything like that trailer. He wouldn’t let his family see a place like that and I knew he wasn’t staying there for anything other than as a place to hide out. That place looked terrible. It was honestly the worst part of it for me--that’s the place where my brother died. That was a nasty place. I didn’t know places like that really existed, other than from watching [the TV show] COPS and stuff.

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This is the second installment of a 3-part interview with Chris Blake. Tomorrow, Chris talks about his feelings toward the family of Trooper Tony Radulescu and how the Blake family will pick up the pieces, moving forward.