With only a knife, some food, water, and a sleeping roll, Kat Pringle headed into Nevada’s rugged White Mountains alone.

She was barely a teenager, but it was her turn to spend the night — to survive — on her own, as part of a coming-of-age initiation dreamed up by her father, who ruled over his family with a mix of ideology and impossible expectations.

As teenagers, Kat and her siblings were expected to complete the trial. Her father demanded she spend one night in the mountains alone. Kat stayed for three.

“I don’t know if it was to anybody else, but to herself, she wanted to prove that she could withstand this,” says her mother, Vera Tabib.

Kat, whose legal full name was Jasmine Katranne Pringle, learned at a young age not just to weather cruel circumstances, but to push beyond them. She became fierce in the face of hardship, and, years later, as a young, single mom, determined to secure a happier life for herself and her son.

But even that toughness, her martial arts training, and the knife she always carried could not protect her from the injustice of domestic violence. On Nov. 27, 2024, the day before Thanksgiving, Kat, a Sonoma County park ranger, was found in her employee housing high up on Hood Mountain, killed, authorities say, by her former colleague and then-boyfriend, Keith Gray, who also took his own life.

She was 38.

For Kat’s family, her death pierced the veil of a hazy relationship at its end. Looking back, they describe it as a time of transformation in her life, when she’d found a job that could be her calling, and a mountaintop home with views to fire her imagination.

Then a man she trusted and loved took it from her.

Kat, the oldest of her three full siblings and third oldest of her father’s eight children, grew up in Dyer, Nevada, a small, unincorporated town in Fish Lake Valley. Her family moved there from Los Angeles when Kat was about 6, attracted by surroundings that felt “pristine” and “safe” compared to their life in LA, Tabib says.

Their property was situated on a large tract of dried-up lake bed between the Silver Peak and White Mountain ranges. It had no house and boasted only an old barn and a few adobe outbuildings. For the first seven years, the family had no phone.

Over several years, the blended family, including Tabib, a stepmom, and their children, converted the barn into a home. Directing it all was Kat’s father, Stuart Pringle, a native of South Africa and documentary filmmaker who forced the family to live by his peculiar blend of ideologies and religions.

Life with him was “interesting” both in good and bad ways, says Tabib, an Armenian Lebanese native of Iraq. She and Stuart met in LA and connected over their shared interest in spirituality.

Over the years, he became increasingly “eccentric” and eventually “abusive,” as his bipolar disorder worsened, Tabib says.

In Nevada, he demanded his children fix the world — like solving conflicts in the Middle East, a task assigned to Kat’s brother, Ramses Pringle. Stuart would blame others when his plans came up short, his vision unrealized.

“He was so narcissistic, he would destroy your dreams,” says Kat’s son, Seth Pringle, 23. “He would not let you have a dream that was not one of his own for you.”

Kat found respite in nature and philosophy books, which served as a touchstone with her father, who often discussed the books with her. Intellectual challenge — reading and exploring the world of ideas — was encouraged among the kids, so long as they did not outwardly contradict their father’s own dogma, says Ramses.

She moved from philosopher to philosopher as one way to process what she was forced to endure and accept on a remote homestead where she and her siblings were homeschooled. At one point she latched onto the Roman Stoics, but never settled on a single worldview.

“She just couldn’t consume enough of it and it made her wise beyond her years, probably in a way that was unfortunate,” Ramses says. “It shouldn’t have been something that she needed to escape to, to make sense of her world.”

At 17, just a few years after she climbed the mountain to survive on her own, Kat had Seth, and though still so young herself, was determined to give him sanctuary.

In a black and white photo of mother and son, Kat aims a bow and arrow at a target downrange, her long hair spilling over her shoulders. Seth, an infant, sits in a carrier strapped to her back. It is one of Tabib’s favorite pictures of her daughter. It is also the first picture that Seth shared of his mother during an interview months after her death.

They spent his first years living on the family’s property. Seth recalls his grandfather as quick to anger — imperious and abrasive with anyone who disagreed with him.

When Kat was about 24 her father learned she was seeing someone he did not approve of. He kicked her out and gave Seth, who was 7 or 8 at the time, the choice to either stay or go. The two moved in with Kat’s boyfriend, Carlos, whom Seth came to see as a father of sorts, but who was also controlling and jealous, Seth recalls.

Kat and Carlos had plans — they got married in Las Vegas and were going to start a trucking company. But those plans fell apart as their relationship deteriorated. Carlos struggled with anger, often lashing out verbally at Seth, and he became suspicious of Kat, questioning her loyalty whenever she befriended another man.

The outdoors offered Kat an escape. She became a regular on a 34-mile mountain route leading from Fish Lake Valley to Silver Peak, which is part of an annual challenge called “Silver Peak or Bust” and includes a roughly 3,000-foot climb.

It became a proving ground for Kat. She was determined to set the fastest time on the trek, and though she never achieved that, Seth says, she came close, coming in at five hours — a blistering pace of sub 10-minute miles in rough terrain.

She also shared the trail with Seth, aiming to complete it together one day. Each outing, she’d encourage him not to give up, to try just one more mile, and when Seth was 11, they completed the full distance.

“She was so, so proud of him, and I think it was her way of passing on the value of mental and physical grit,” Zarina “Rina” Pringle, Kat’s younger sister, wrote in an email, her grief still too raw for an interview.

Eventually, Kat and Seth left Nevada for Sonoma County, where her mother and siblings, by then estranged from Kat’s father, were living near extended family.

It was there that Kat enrolled in the academy for park rangers and, later, met Keith Gray.

“She was looking for someone that could understand her pain, but there’s not always someone like her who transformed their pain into something better,” Seth says. “It’s a hard man to find and unfortunately, she landed on another one that was more messed up than even her father.”

By all accounts, Kat projected fierceness. She signaled it through the black tactical boots she loved to wear, her expertise in the martial art of Muay Thai, and the elaborate tattoos she had inked on during long sessions, where she pushed through the pain from the needles, sometimes near the point of fainting.

Her hard exterior was solidified by a reluctance to open up to others, but the few she did let in knew Kat to be funny, quirky, and thoughtful. She loved kids, dressing up for Halloween, and live music. She particularly loved metal bands, including Metallica and the Swedish band Opeth. A movie buff, she dropped references to films like “The Lord of The Rings,” and in her kitchen hung a clock indicating the time for hobbit meals — “second breakfast” and “elevensies,” beloved lore among fans of the trilogy. The clock is broken now, but Seth still has it.

“Why so serious?” was tattooed along one of her fingers, a tribute to the Joker’s refrain in one of the Batman movies she loved and its director, Christopher Nolan, one of her favorites. It was also a quip she shared with her brother Ramses. Over the years, the two reminded each other that it was OK to let loose, Ramses says.

Other tattoos were also drawn from details of her life: a Capricorn for her stepmom, who was an important part of her childhood; a Taurus for Seth; and a dragon with phases of the moon, her favorite celestial body. The dragon was portrayed eating its own tail in the shape of an ouroboros, and the moons in the center appeared as skulls.

“The tattoo was a way of her grappling with the cycle of life and death, and where we fit into it,” says Rina.

She once told Ramses that her skin was her vulnerability and the tattoos her armor. The more she had, the more of herself she felt safe to share.

Kat was meticulous in how she presented herself. She would meet friends wearing a band T-shirt stylishly tucked into her jeans, her hair and makeup done lightly but nicely. She’d just gotten out of bed, she’d say.

It made Francine Keller laugh. “Nothing was accidental with her, even her outfits,” Keller remembers.

The two met at Santa Rosa Junior College’s Public Safety Training Center where Kat was training to join the park rangers and Keller was training to become a law enforcement officer. They bonded over being moms in demanding, male-dominated fields.

At graduation Kat gave Keller a beaded friendship bracelet with Keller’s name. The gift was classic Kat — “dorky and quirky and f—ing cool,” Keller says.

After graduating, Kat became a Sonoma County park ranger in 2018, the same year as Gray.

It’s a small group of less than two dozen rangers who patrol the county’s sprawling parks network, which spans 60 sites and encompasses nearly 18,000 acres. Rangers collect fees, interact with visitors, lead staff, oversee projects, and respond to medical and other emergencies.

The job’s public safety responsibilities combined with the outdoor setting appealed to Kat. Having completed high school with a GED, she’d stretched herself to get into the academy, working as an emergency medical technician and shoring up her professional network — not an easy step for someone uneasy opening up to others.

Gray already had several years of experience working as a ranger by the time he joined Sonoma County Regional Parks. His LinkedIn profile shows he worked as a federal park ranger from May 2008 through June 2015. His parents, through an intermediary, declined to be interviewed for this story.

His work as a national park ranger took him all over the country, with stops at Mount Rainier in Washington state, Yellowstone, Big Bend in Texas and, ultimately, Point Reyes National Seashore in West Marin, where he worked for five years.

Previously, he’d worked in New York as a counselor in mental health, crisis, and rehabilitation fields. With the National Park Service, his assignments had included “special operations,” he told Gabriel Lindeman, a fellow Sonoma County park ranger.

“He had a really eclectic work history,” Lindeman recalls.

As a county ranger, Gray was primarily assigned to a district that includes Sonoma Valley, Santa Rosa, and central Sonoma County parks. He was also a certified defensive instructor with the department, as were Kat and Lindeman. Lindeman was the first of the three to get certified as a defensive instructor, training the county paid for. Kat and Gray put themselves through the intense 40-hour course on their own dime, using vacation to do it, Lindeman says.

Observing Gray in that role, it was clear he was highly trained in martial arts, Lindeman says. He was also dedicated to yoga and would talk about philosophy and travel—interests he shared with Kat. Other than that, Gray kept mostly to himself, Lindeman says.

“I always felt like he was kind of just putting on a façade, being professional, putting on that face,” Lindeman says. “I knew nothing else about him.”

Though private herself, Lindeman recalls Kat brought warmth and especially humor to the job. She always made people laugh.

Among her colleagues, Kat always made sure to check in and let them know she was there to help. When Lindeman was going through a tough divorce, Kat would ask how he was doing and offer to cover his shifts if he needed a break.

“All of us that knew her through work, we knew she cared about us,” Lindeman says. “We all cared about each other very, very deeply but that didn’t mean she was going to divulge anything.”

Co-workers didn’t know Kat and Gray were dating until the fall of 2024, just months before their deaths, Lindeman says.

Even Kat’s close friend, Keller, was not clear exactly how their relationship began. She believes Kat had recently ended things with another man when the two started seeing each other. Maybe he “love bombed” her or said the right thing at the right time, Keller says.

But Kat’s loved ones recall few, if any, warm moments where their bond was evident. Gray was reluctant to get to know them, and they say he seemed to drink too much and often talked down to Kat.

“I think her very existence held a mirror up to him, and he couldn’t stand to look at himself,” her sister Rina says.

Any love he felt toward her, he seemed to largely keep to himself, according to Kat’s family. Her mother can recall one exception: He once shared that Kat was the most intelligent woman he knew.

Gray left his job as a park ranger in January 2023. He didn’t tell co-workers much about why he quit but Lindeman and Kat’s family recall he seemed frustrated with how the department was operating.

Not long after he left, the county moved to strip the ranger corps of its peace-officer status. The move was intended to help the department fill vacant positions by easing job requirements, but it was strongly opposed by park rangers.

“He saw the way it was going to go before the rest of us did,” Lindeman says.

Kat became “the tip of the spear” representing the park rangers in their opposition to the change, Lindeman says. She loved the first-responder aspect of her job and took pride in the numerous certifications she’d worked so hard to get.

She was one of several park rangers to publicly address the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors during a meeting in July 2024. Wearing a black blazer over a gray shirt, her hair pulled neatly into a bun, Kat stepped up to the podium and called on the board to reject the plan.

“It is a slap in the face to the diverse and dedicated group of men and women who serve as Sonoma County Regional Park Rangers, to tell them now that all the hard work and sacrifice it took to get us where we are today, was unnecessary,” she said. “And worse, that anyone can do what we do.”

Still, the board ultimately approved the change, which took effect later that year. The move reclassified park rangers as public officers without primary law enforcement duties and transferred those duties to a newly established Sheriff’s Office parks unit.

By this time, Kat and Gray had already been living together with Seth in Kat’s ranger quarters at Hood Mountain Regional Park, a rugged, 2,000-acre wilderness overlooking Sonoma Valley.

When Gray moved in, Tabib recalled thinking that he would at least be able to protect her if anything happened at the house, given its remote setting and her line of work.

“Imagine that,” Tabib says. “That was my thinking.”

Kat’s friends and family saw even less of Gray after he quit his ranger job. Their relationship also seemed ever more fragile, family members recall. Lindeman tried reaching out to see how he was doing. He never heard back.

Those close to the couple say he was trying to figure out his next step after leaving the county. But he seemed to sink into depression.

A fuller portrait of Gray for this story was not possible, as efforts to find people who would agree to an interview proved unsuccessful over many months.

Kat would drop little pieces of what was going on at random moments, but never shared the full picture. “He’s complicated,” Kat once told her mom. “But I’m complicated, too.”

Her loved ones wrestled with how much to pry, fearful if they pushed too much she would stop sharing entirely. “I feel like we all had a different piece, that if we had all of them, we would have been like, ‘This isn’t good,’” Keller says.

Tabib believes Kat tried to get Gray help, suggesting doctors, therapists, and medication. She was met with resistance, her mother says.

“It just gets worse from there if you don’t get help,” Tabib says, speaking from her personal experience with abuse. “You have to remove yourself from the situation or have intervention that’s professional.”

Seth’s relationship with Gray was also fraught. The older man seemed to resent the tight bond Kat shared with her son and once even said he shouldn’t have been born, Seth recalls. As the couple began to quarrel more, things worsened between the two men. Then, one day in the spring of 2023, it turned physical.

Kat was at work, so Seth, around 20 at the time, was alone in the house with Gray, who was in a bad mood. Trying to avoid any confrontation, Seth had gone to his room, but all of a sudden Gray was in the doorway, irate and screaming. Seth had been watching YouTube videos, and he guesses it was the noise that stoked Gray’s outburst.

“It was such a scale of anger it was scaring me because it made absolutely no sense,” Seth recalls.

As he tried to get out of the room, Seth shoved Gray, who hit his head on the doorframe. Bleeding, he tackled Seth and the fight moved into the living room, where Seth says he tried to put some distance between them. Gray punched him in the face, then called Kat to tell her he was bleeding and it was Seth’s fault.

Seth, meanwhile, walked to a nearby creek to wash off the older man’s blood before going to his grandmother’s house, where he ended up moving.

After that, Seth stopped spending time at his mom’s house. They still spoke often on the phone and would meet weekly, often to hike, going deep into Trione-Annadel State Park, Riverfront Regional Park, or other local open spaces.

Seth tried to smooth things over with her boyfriend, too, going so far as to send Gray a letter apologizing for his role in what happened. As far as Seth knows, he never read it, and the two never spoke again.

Kat was distressed about what happened but wouldn’t talk about it when Tabib asked.

“She loved him. She was protective,” Tabib says.

She told her brother Ramses that Seth moving out was probably more of a positive step. She seemed more upset with herself, Ramses recalls.

In July 2024, Kat moved into a different ranger house, still in the park but higher up Hood Mountain. The department had acquired the four-bedroom ranch home in December 2023. Kat, who requested the placement, was the first park ranger to live there.

A white picket fence bordered the front yard at the end of a steep, winding road surrounded by rising grassland and trees. The 25-minute drive from Santa Rosa, with white-knuckle stretches, was filled with spectacular views of Sonoma Valley far below. Kat loved those views.

The house was meant to be a refuge for her. Seth was grown, her time outside of work was freeing up and she’d begun to travel. She filled the home with plants, philosophy books, her cat T-Rex, and little projectors that cast stars and aurora borealis patterns on the walls.

At the end of October, Kat added a set of tartan scarves with the family name. They were gifts she had picked up while traveling Europe that fall.

The three-week trip was momentous for Kat. She had long dreamed of visiting Europe, inspired in part by the philosophers she had spent so many years studying. The countries on her list included France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Scotland.

To the surprise of those in Kat’s circle, Gray joined her on the trip. He’d been jobless for over a year. The trip appeared to be a “make-or-break” trial both for their relationship and for him personally, according to her friends and family.

Kat loved the trip, particularly their time in Scotland, the ancestral home for a branch of her family. Gray was so taken with the country he talked of wanting to go back to school there for counseling.

But their relationship seemed over.

Two nights before Thanksgiving, Kat told her sister she didn’t see it lasting. Kat had brought over some of her clothes that she no longer wanted to wear. They were colorful, which Gray liked, but she’d decided she wanted to go back to the black clothes and boots that suited her.

“She seemed different that night,” Rina recalls. “A little sad, but more like herself than she had been in a long time. She seemed clear headed and strong.”

Rina believes Kat ended her relationship with Gray that night when she returned home to Hood Mountain. She was due to start work at 9 a.m. the next day, Nov. 27.

Kat was always on time for work.

At the start of every shift she’d radio in confirming that she was starting and what her location was, per protocol. So when Lindeman didn’t hear her voice come over the radio that morning, he grew worried.

No one else working knew where she was and it looked as though she was going to miss an 11 a.m. meeting.

Lindeman drove to her house to check on her, wondering if maybe she had gone to Nevada, like she mentioned she might, and got snowed in.

When he summited the long driveway, Lindeman spotted Kat’s truck parked in front, but there was no answer when he knocked on the door. Lindeman searched for her near the property. He tried calling her and even texted Gray before making the trek back to the park office at Spring Lake in Santa Rosa to find keys to access her garage. All the while he wracked his brain about where she might be.

When his search for the keys proved fruitless, Lindeman returned to the Hood Mountain house, where he discovered the front door was unlocked. Opening it, he did not step inside, but called for Kat.

There was only silence.

Lindeman updated his supervisor and requested a wellness check. When a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy arrived about 30 minutes later, Lindeman followed him through the front door.

He made it about four steps inside when the deputy, who had rounded the corner down a hallway, stopped and told Lindeman he shouldn’t go any farther — a warning Lindeman heeded and for which he remains grateful. He’d seen bodies before, but never one of a friend.

Kat’s body was found in the bathroom. She was wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt, and her nails were painted with clear polish. The coroner’s report shows she died of multiple gunshot wounds. Gray, whose body was found alongside her, died of a single gunshot wound. The coroner’s report shows he was wearing two robes, one white and one brown. The brown robe had a black folding knife in one pocket and a flashlight in the other.

The news came to family members who had gathered in the area for Thanksgiving. Ramses had driven up from San Francisco a few days early and was staying with friends in Guerneville where Rina and her husband arrived to meet him.

It was late, around 11 p.m. and Ramses had spent the day in Sebastopol helping his uncle prepare to host the holiday meal. He didn’t know why his sister and brother-in-law were stopping by so late, but figured it was something serious.

He watched them hold hands as they walked up to the front door. He joked, he recalls, that they looked like someone had died. They told him it was Kat. Gray had killed her.

Then they asked him for help telling their mother and Seth, uncoiling a plan to inform each of their shared, unspeakable loss.

Tabib was already awake when they arrived the next morning. She came outside and joined her children in the car where they delivered the news. Seth was still asleep.

“I had never heard wailing quite like that in my life,” Ramses says. “It was both beautiful and just the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I just held her and then I finally cried for the first time.”

Seth remembers thinking it was a dream when Rina told him. He ran through different scenarios in his head, playing out what he or anyone could have done differently to stop his mother’s murder.

Hate for that man overtook him.

“That very moment where he pulled the trigger, it will never make sense,” Seth says. “Because the only way it would make sense is if you had done something like that yourself.”

In the fleet of park ranger trucks, in the rangers’ main Santa Rosa office, and in the satellite sites across the county, there are heart-shaped magnets bearing Kat’s photo. “Pretty much anywhere they will stick,” Lindeman says.

The magnets came from a memorial organized in March by Seth at Petaluma’s Tolay Lake Regional Park, which fills with birdsong in the spring. Lindeman found it too difficult to stay long.

He can still hear Kat’s voice as though she were sitting in the truck with him. Most days, Lindeman says he catches himself thinking about what happened, but not every day like he used to. He and his colleagues are doing better, but they still carry a lot of anger toward Gray.

The friends and family of loved ones killed by their domestic partners share one common void among all their different losses: Amid overwhelming grief, they are left with more questions than answers.

The Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Unit determined Kat’s murder “was related to domestic violence.” But, for Kat’s family, the account from authorities hasn’t filled in many of the blanks about what led up to her death. They’ve received her belongings, including her phone, which the Sheriff’s Office held for months during its investigation, but its contents are stuck behind passwords the family hasn’t been able to crack.

Tabib says she knows even elusive answers at this point won’t change the fact that Kat is gone. “That’s the part that’s never going to be healed,” she says. “I think you just kind of learn to live with it.”

For Kat’s colleagues, friends, and family members, their grief is compounded by the cruel way she was yanked from their lives.

Before her friend’s death, Keller had purchased ingredients to make brandied cherries for Kat’s birthday, which was in March, when they instead held her memorial. Their last texts were about a food dehydrator Kat planned to borrow.

For a few months after her death, Keller texted reels to Kat’s phone, not knowing who else would appreciate them like Kat had. She wasn’t ready to let go.

For Tabib, Kat lives on in a portrait, painted after her death, that now hangs in Tabib’s living room. Seeing it makes her cry every day.

She compares her daughter’s life to a shooting star — brilliant and too fast.

The morning of Kat’s memorial, on a rainy day at the end of March, Kat’s brothers and sisters, her mother, and Seth gathered early at a Santa Rosa tattoo parlor to get tattoos using ink infused with her ashes. Each one shows different phases of the moon, inspired by Kat’s dragon tattoo and love for the night sky. After a hard day, she’d step outside to stargaze and meditate, Seth recalls.

Some customized their tattoos with other details from Kat’s life.

Seth has a black cat sitting on a gibbous moon; his mother loved black cats.

Tabib doesn’t like tattoos, but she got one anyway. Hers features a shooting star.

Domestic Violence Resources

For emergencies, call 911.

YWCA Sonoma County: 24-hour crisis hotline at 707-546-1234

The YWCA is the singular provider of a 24-hour crisis hotline and safe house in Sonoma County. The organization also provides specialized therapy and other services for children, adolescents, adults, and families. ywcasc.org

The Family Justice Center: 707-565-8255

The Family Justice Center is a collaborative of multiple partner agencies who provide services for those who have experienced domestic violence or intimate partner violence, elder abuse, child abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking. fjcsc.org