Soldiers Disarm Woman During Roadside Knife Attack

Police car with flashing lights following a minivan on a highway — Photo: Adwo / Shutterstock

When a rollover crash on an interstate turns into a knife attack on children inside seconds, the outcome depends entirely on who happens to be nearby — and on southbound I-5 near DuPont, Washington, the people who happened to be nearby were two soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord who left their own vehicle to disarm a woman mid-attack.

Key Points

A woman later identified as 35-year-old Janieka Ellington of Steilacoom crashed her SUV on southbound I-5 near DuPont around 9 a.m. and then attacked two girls with a knife, according to Washington State Patrol-sourced reporting.
A 9-year-old girl suffered multiple broken bones and a stab wound; a 15-year-old girl was also present and hospitalized without serious injuries.
Two JBLM soldiers who witnessed the crash stopped, intervened, and got the knife away from the suspect before troopers arrived.
Ellington was taken to a hospital for evaluation before being booked into Pierce County Jail on charges that expanded from DUI and vehicular assault to attempted murder.
Investigators have said the crash itself may have been intentional, which bears directly on how prosecutors are framing the case.

What Happened on I-5 Near DuPont

Just before 9 a.m., an SUV traveling southbound on Interstate 5 near DuPont left its lane, struck a shoulder barrier, and collided with a semi-truck. Accounts of the exact mechanics vary slightly — some reporting describes a rollover before impact, other coverage has the vehicle crossing lanes first — but the core sequence is consistent across Washington State Patrol-sourced accounts: a crash, followed almost immediately by a knife attack on the children inside or near the vehicle. One later account from investigators adds a sharper edge to that sequence, stating that Ellington “purposely crashed her vehicle into a concrete barrier” before producing the knife, a detail that reframes the collision not as an accident that triggered a breakdown but as a possible first act in a continuous, deliberate assault.

That distinction matters enormously to how the case will be charged and prosecuted. A crash followed by a panicked or disoriented outburst is a different legal and human story than a crash used as the opening move of an intended attack. Washington State Patrol’s ongoing investigation into DUI, vehicular assault, and the attack itself reflects exactly that ambiguity being worked out in real time by investigators who have to establish intent, not just sequence.

The Soldiers Who Stopped to Help

Two soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a sprawling Army and Air Force installation that sits just off this stretch of I-5, saw the crash unfold and pulled over. What happened next is reported with slightly different granularity across outlets — one version describes them physically removing the knife, another describes them restraining the suspect until troopers arrived — but every account agrees on the essential fact: armed only with proximity and willingness, the two men intervened directly in an active knife attack and ended it before state troopers could reach the scene. A responding medic later described treating the teenage victim at the scene, underscoring how quickly the emergency response stack — bystanders, then military personnel, then medical responders, then law enforcement — had to assemble on a live highway shoulder.

This is the detail that turned a roadside tragedy into a story with a measure of grace attached to it. JBLM sits adjacent to one of the busiest freight corridors on the West Coast, and soldiers stationed there are a routine, almost invisible part of the traffic flow past DuPont. That two of them happened to be positioned to intervene, and chose to, is the difference between a story about an attack and a story about an attack that was stopped.

The Victims and Their Injuries

The younger of the two girls, age 9, suffered multiple broken bones and a stab wound, injuries consistent with both the physical trauma of the crash and the knife attack that followed. The 15-year-old girl present at the scene was hospitalized as a precaution but did not sustain serious injuries. Reporting on the exact relationship between the suspect and the two girls is not uniform — some coverage identifies them as her daughters, while earlier wire reporting describes them more generically as children riding with her — but the weight of later, more detailed reporting, including identification of the suspect by name and charges tied to the family unit, supports the daughters framing. Medical response at the scene moved quickly given the setting: a working interstate shoulder, a rolled or crashed vehicle, and an active weapon. The involvement of a child this young, injured this severely, is the element of the case most likely to shape public reaction going forward, and appropriately so.

From a DUI Investigation to Attempted Murder Charges

In the hours immediately following the incident, Washington State Patrol described the matter as an active investigation into DUI, vehicular assault, and first-degree assault — language that reflects the standard, conservative charging posture agencies take before a full collision report and probable-cause statement are finalized. Washington law requires officers investigating any injury collision to file a signed, sworn collision report, and that document — along with any booking affidavit — becomes the authoritative record that eventually supersedes the early verbal summaries reporters rely on.

Later reporting closed that gap considerably. The suspect was identified by name, Janieka Ellington, and the charge set was reported to include attempted murder and vehicular assault — a meaningfully more serious framing than the initial DUI-centered description. That evolution from a traffic-and-assault investigation to an attempted-murder charge is not a contradiction in the reporting so much as it is the normal arc of how a violent crime case develops: patrol-level description gives way to prosecutorial charging once investigators have assembled physical evidence, witness statements, and a working theory of intent. An arrest and a charge are not a conviction, and the final disposition of the case will rest with a Pierce County court.

Why This Case Resonates Beyond Pierce County

Stories like this one persist in public memory not because the mechanics of a highway collision are inherently gripping, but because they compress a recognizable anxiety — violence erupting without warning in an ordinary setting — against an answer that feels restorative: ordinary people, in this case soldiers simply driving home, closing the gap between harm and help. That pairing is why roadside-intervention stories travel so widely, and why they deserve to be reported on their own terms rather than treated as a referendum on how fast official paperwork moves. The crash happened, the attack happened, the soldiers intervened, and the children survived. Everything downstream of that — the exact charge, the final collision report, the courtroom outcome — will be determined by Pierce County prosecutors and a judge, not by the pace of early news coverage.