SEATTLE (Reuters) ? SWAT teams searched Mount Rainier National Park for a second day on Monday for a heavily-armed Iraq war veteran suspected of killing a park ranger on New Year's Day and fleeing into the rugged terrain.
The manhunt prompted the evacuation during the night of carloads of more than 100 tourists by police escort down a winding mountain road.
"They're all down," Garry Olson, a Pierce County fire chief, said of the tourist evacuation. "They got kids out with young kids first."
Margaret Anderson, 34, the mother of two young children and wife of another ranger, was killed on Sunday when she stopped the gunman's vehicle at a roadblock, a park spokesman said.
The suspect, identified by police as Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, fled on foot.
SWAT teams, heavily armed officers and airplanes, using infrared technology to scan the ground for the gunman's body heat, searched the snowy landscape for him during the night.
Barnes, an Iraq war veteran with survivalist training, also is suspected in a separate early New Year's Day shooting incident that injured three men and a woman at a house party in the Skyway neighborhood of Renton, Washington near Seattle, according to the King County Sheriff's Department.
Photographs released to local television showed a heavily tattooed Barnes with the words "Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust" on the back of his neck.
Law enforcement began escorting 125 tourists from the park's Jackson Visitor Center at its Paradise landmark, and guests at the 25-room National Park Inn at Longmire just before midnight for the hour-long journey down a winding road through the park, said Garry Olson, a Pierce County fire chief.
Officers escorted the visitors in groups of five to 10 cars for 25 miles to the fire station in Ashford, where four FBI agents briefly interviewed each tourist.
Earlier, a motorcade with flashing blue lights escorted the body of the slain ranger from the park to Tacoma, Washington to the Pierce County coroner's office.
The park, which is about 80 miles southeast of Seattle, remained closed to visitors on Monday. About 1.7 million visitors traveled in 2010 to Mount Rainier National Park, established by Congress on March 2, 1899.
More than 35 square miles of permanent ice and snow cover Mount Rainier, 14,410 feet above sea level. The temperature on Monday morning hovered near freezing.
In nearby Eatonville, where Anderson lived, the mood among regular patrons at Mountain View Cafe was "very sad," said waitress Patty Wrzesien. "Everyone is wanting to know what they can do to help. It's not good."
(Editing by Greg McCune and Barbara Goldberg)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120102/us_nm/us_death_ranger
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