Tuesday afternoon in rural Moses Lake turned into a crime scene when deputies pulled up to a home on the former Larson Air Force Base. Inside the house on Travis Drive, officers found 79-year-old Jerry R. Koch dead.
Jerry was a long-time local resident who kept to himself. At 79, he spent his days around the neighborhood near Craw Lane, living a quiet life in Grant County. Neighbors were used to seeing him around his yard, going about his everyday routine.
Everything changed around 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Jerry’s daughter called emergency dispatchers with a frantic warning. She told operators she could not reach her father and believed her 52-year-old brother, Joel Ray Koch, had done something terrible to him.
When deputies arrived at the house, they found Jerry dead inside. His face showed clear signs of severe physical beating. There were no signs that anyone had broken into the house from the outside, which pointed investigators straight to what happened indoors overnight.
Security video from a neighbor’s house captured one of the last moments Jerry was heard alive. Late Monday night, around 11:25 p.m., the camera caught Joel walking through a nearby yard. Moments later, Jerry’s voice boomed across the yard, shouting for his son to come back home.
That short clip of video and audio gave investigators a key piece of the timeline. It showed a father trying to call his son back into the house just hours before his body was discovered. Nobody else was seen coming or going from the property through the rest of the night.
Word of the killing spread quickly through the Moses Lake area. Neighbors on the old air base watched as law enforcement wrapped yellow tape around the property. Sheriff’s deputies put out a community notification to let locals know there was no active threat to the surrounding neighborhood.
Now, Jerry’s daughter and surviving relatives are left dealing with a sudden, painful loss. A man who lived nearly eight decades ended his life in a room full of violence, leaving his family to piece together how a normal weekday turned into a nightmare.
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