Elementary school teacher Jennifer Paulson was gunned down by the man who had been stalking her for seven years. INSIDE EDITION has the story.
911 Operator: "911, what are you reporting?
Jennifer Paulson: "Hi, I am reporting someone who I have an anti-harassment order out on, somebody who is following me right now. He's honking at me. He's trying to talk to me."
It was a young woman's desperate call for help. A lunatic who had been stalking her for nearly seven years was tailing her in his car.
Paulson: "It's really concerning because something is going on. He's not acting like a normal average person acts."
Jennifer Paulson, a special education teacher from Tacoma, Washington, explains to the operator how her stalker, Jed Waits, had been relentlessly pursuing her since 2003.
Paulson: "He would call me multiple times, you know, 20 times in a night, throughout the night. 2 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning. He showed up at my school. I had roses on my car on Tuesday. There wasn't a note or anything, but it must, I mean it had to have been him."
Paulson's family say she met Waits when they both attended Seattle Pacific University. They persuaded her to obtain an order of protection against him in 2008.
911 Operator: "Has he ever been, like, violent towards you?"
Paulson: "No, not at all. He's never threatened me. He's never been violent. He's never done anything like that."
After the 911 call in February, Waits was arrested and thrown in jail, but he was released on bail.
"We said, 'Stay here, stay here, you can stay here as long as you want,' my husband offered to drive her to school and pick her up, but she said, 'Oh no Mom, I'll be fine,' " Paulson's mother, Nancy Heisler, tells INSIDE EDITION.
Just four days after his release, her stalker was waiting for Paulson when she showed up for work at Birney Elementary School. He pulled a gun on her in the parking lot.
Caller: "We have a shooting here, a teacher's been shot."
911 Operator: "Okay. The shooter himself. Do you know who that was?"
Caller: "We have a good idea. He, he harassed her before."
Waits fled but 10 miles down the road he was pulled over. When he fired on cops he was shot dead.
At a memorial for Paulson, her students, colleagues, and heartbroken parents remembered the beautiful, kind young woman who was taken from them far too soon.
"Our hearts aren't bitter, but they're broken. We don't want this to happen somebody else," said Ken Paulson, her father.
Paulson's grieving mother had a message for the family of her daughter's killer. She said, "You couldn't have stopped your son any more than we could have saved Jennifer."
