Police: Everett cab driver beat two female passengers with baton; injuries required stitches

EVERETT, Wash. – Two women say a cab ride last Friday changed their lives forever when, they allege, the driver refused to bring them to their Everett home and instead forced them out of the car and beat them to the point of needing stitches.

The cab driver, Jeremy Stack, 40, has since been charged with two counts of assault for allegedly delivering repeated blows to the women with a  baton after prosecutors say they asked a question about the fare. The 6-foot, 270-pound driver had no criminal history, Everett police say.

He's been behind bars since Friday and appeared before a judge on Monday.



“If my cousin didn’t have my baby, if she didn’t protect him, he could be dead, we could be dead,” said “Amanda,” one of the victims. Q13 News is protecting her identity, after the mother of two learned Stack could be out on $40,000 bail.

Amanda and her cousin, “Ashley”, said a flippant comment about the fare and taking a shortcut set the driver off.

“He snapped,” said Ashley, recalling the moment he stopped the car.

“He pulls into the middle lane, and there’s heavy traffic, and tells us to get the “F” out of his car,” said Amanda.

The two women, along with Amanda’s two children, were a half-mile from home, and now in the middle of a three-lane road.

“I am yelling back, screaming at him, telling him to turn into a parking lot because I had small children with me,” said Amanda.

Giving up, Amanda said she went to get the stroller and grocery bags from the back of the cab, when her 4-year-old daughter bolted for the sidewalk.

“There’s a giant school bus coming down the street and you hear ‘ERRRRRK,’” said Amanda. Her daughter came within inches of being struck, she said.

In the moment Amanda grabbed her daughter, she said, Stack got out of his car with a military-style baton from under his seat. “I heard it before I saw it,” she said. “It makes this horrible loud crack sound,” she said, flipping her wrist to simulate his motion to extend the weapon.

With the baton in his hand, Amanda said, the driver walked right past her and her daughter and headed for Ashley, who at the time was holding Amanda’s 1-year-old son.

“He just runs up on her and starts hitting her in the arm that she is holding my son,” said Amanda.

“He wasn’t going for the body, he was going for heads,” said Ashley.

She broke down and asked, “Why he would do that? I have no idea.”

Amanda pushed Stack off of Ashley, but the cab driver, she said, got right back up. “He turns around and hits me across my head, I start going down, he hits me again and then blood just starts pouring out of my head,” she said.

Staples seal the four-inch gash caused by the beating. Amanda’s lip is still bruised and swollen, but it’s the memory of the attack that Amanda said hurts the worse.

“Over $8, you’re going to kill two women and two children?”

“He is a danger to the community if he were to be released on his own recognizance,” said the Snohomish County prosecutor at Monday’s appearance, hoping to increase Stack’s bail.

Amanda and Ashley said the assault happened without warning, and they worry he may snap again.

“I hope justice can get served,” said Ashley. “I am hoping that he realizes what he did is wrong,” said Amanda.

Q13 News reached out to Everett Cab, the company that employed Stack as a driver. The owner declined an interview and said his only statement would be that “what happened on Friday was a misunderstanding between the driver and the passenger.”