(Just The News)—A Washington state lawmaker is sharing exclusive details of the terrifying incident last weekend in which his 32-year-old son was shot near his Moses Lake home.
Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, spoke with The Center Square Saturday, one week after his son Monty Dent was injured in a drive-by shooting.
Dent, who is serving his sixth term in the legislature, said he was notified Friday, March 14, that one person had been taken into custody in connection with the incident, but others remain at large.
“He went to Taco Bell to get some food for his family, and he started for home and there was a couple of cars acting erratic on the road,” Dent said, sharing what his son told him about the moments just before bullets riddled his vehicle along Stratford Road shortly after 8 p.m., March 8.
Dent said his son told him the car came up right behind with high beams on.
“He brake checked them and they didn’t back off, but pulled up alongside and started shooting,” said Dent. “He felt a sting but didn’t know what was happening, but then realized he was probably shot, so he got off the road and got the car stopped.”
The shooter’s vehicle took off. Dent had bullet wounds to his left arm in two places and to his back. He called 911 and help arrived quickly.
“They do have one in custody, and we have a name from police put out yesterday, but Monty thought there were four,” said Dent, who also said Moses Lake police and Grant County Sherriff’s officers are actively working the case.
A firearm was recovered with the person taken into custody and police are working to confirm if it was the gun used in the shooting.
The lawmaker shared the panic of learning about the shooting while he was on the floor of the House about 8:45 p.m. that Saturday. The phone call came from Monty’s girlfriend who was still confused about what had happened and told Dent that Monty had been in a car crash and had been shot.
Dent said the moments that followed were a flurry of fellow lawmakers and staffers offering to help as he frantically tried to get more information.
“They immediately called the governor’s office, which then went to State Patrol and Chief John Batiste called me and said, ‘I’ve got you and will take you wherever you need to go,’ and I didn’t even know where we were going,” said Dent.
Dent said Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima, rushed him outside to Corry’s personal vehicle and they headed to the airport.
“They would not let me drive anywhere, and they told me State Patrol already had pilots on the way to the airport,” he recalled.
Dent said his wife then notified him their son was being airlifted to Spokane and the State Patrol plane took off in a hurry.
“I got there probably ten minutes after my son got there and he was so happy to see me,” recalled Dent who shared that his son was scared because he knew he’d been shot in the back, and could end up with a permanent spinal injury.
Thankfully the bullet did not reach his spine, and Dent said the arm wounds are the worst of it.
“They did all the right things, and I can’t praise them enough in Moses Lake and in Spokane, everybody was amazing,” said Dent, referring to the medical professionals who tended to his son.
Monty went home the next day and has been recovering at his parents home.
“There were a lot of prayers sent, and I received a lot of emails and texts from other members of the legislature. And the response from the governor’s office to turn the State Patrol loose to help me was so incredible,” he said. “I really can’t say enough about the response.”
Dent said Saturday he was waiting for a detective to send him pictures of his son’s car, which was reportedly riddled with bullet holes. The vehicle is being held for evidence.
The situation could have been so much worse, given the fact Monty Dent has a baby girl who is just 13-months-old, but was thankfully not in the car. Several bullets tore through the car seat buckled in the back.
“If the baby had been in the car seat, how would that have gone?” said Dent. “That was the blessing in that he was by himself in the car.”
Dent said Moses Lake Police brought a brand-new car seat for the baby.
He said it’s unclear if the suspect in custody has any gang ties or what the motive was for the shooting, but Dent said there was another altercation that his son was not involved with, that did involve the suspect vehicle, so he suggested it could have been mistaken identity when they came upon his son’s car.
“There was another altercation with these guys that did the shooting at some store and I think maybe these guys thought he was somebody else because my son said he was never at that store, so I think it was mistaken identity,” he said.
Dent said police got a license plate number on the suspect vehicle from the altercation at the store, so that’s what led to Friday’s arrest.
Dent said once the investigation is complete and things settle down, he’s hoping the awful incident can lead to some good, somehow.
“What is the pathway to start bringing people back together with some kind of respect?” said Dent. “You read about this stuff and hear about it in the media and all of a sudden here it is in your lap. We live in a relatively conservative community where you just don’t think about this happening, but guess what, it’s here.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
