The cellphone belonging to Ruth Dalton was smashed into four pieces when it was found in a recycling bin in Seattle’s Hillman City neighborhood last summer, 6 miles south of where the beloved, 80-year-old dog walker was killed in a violent carjacking.
While Seattle police had a suspect description from eyewitnesses at two separate crime scenes, fingerprints found on Dalton’s phone were what broke the case open, quickly giving investigators the name of her alleged killer who was arrested on Capitol Hill, 24 hours after the initial 911 call.
The prints that belonged to Jahmed Haynes, a 49-year-old man accused of killing Dalton, were among the 6,329 prints left behind at King County crime scenes last year that were identified to a specific person by AFIS examiners, according to AFIS Regional Manager Mike Leahy.
AFIS is an acronym for the automated fingerprint identification system, a regional database containing prints of nearly 1 million people. On the ballot for the eighth time since 1986, King County voters are being asked to reauthorize a 7-year levy beginning in 2026 to continue funding the program used by every law enforcement agency in the county.
During the first year of the proposed levy, an additional property tax of $0.0275 per $1,000 of assessed value would be added, with annual increases limited by statute and exemptions for eligible seniors, veterans and people with disabilities. A home assessed at $885,000 in 2026, for example, would have a maximum levy amount of $24.34.
A simple majority is required for the ballot measure to pass. Ballots must be postmarked by April 22 or returned to a ballot drop box by 8 p.m. to be counted. According to King County Elections, no statement of opposition was submitted against the measure.
Should the measure fail to pass, the responsibility to collect fingerprints for criminal identification would revert to each city’s police department and the sheriff’s office for unincorporated areas of King County. Staff and technology would be reduced or eliminated and cities would need to fund and staff their own services, contract with an outside agency or rely on the Washington State Patrol’s identification services, the latter of which would likely result in a slowdown in criminal and forensic investigations.
While the county’s AFIS program is a valuable tool in criminal investigations, it also serves an important community-care function, said Jose Marenco, chief of the King County sheriff’s office’s criminal investigations division, which AFIS falls under.
Finger and palm prints were used to help the medical examiner’s office identify nearly 700 people who died last year and another 82 people who were hospitalized and unable to identify themselves, he said.
Last month, for instance, Seattle police came across an unresponsive person, who was taken to a hospital and later died.
“But in the time that they were in the hospital, we were able to identify who that person was, find the family, the family showed up and was able to be there before the person passed away,” Marenco said.
“Searching a haystack”
A 1911 murder trial in Chicago was the first time fingerprint evidence led to a conviction in a U.S. courtroom and prints “are still evaluated based on the same descriptions of arches, loops and whorls written by Sir Francis Galton in the late 19th century,” the Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2018.
Fingerprints captured with ink on paper were once the norm until digital systems made the process of collecting and storing fingerprints and then palm prints faster to search and compare.
“I like to think of looking for fingerprints as searching a haystack. It’s easier to search a smaller haystack first,” said Leahy, the AFIS regional manager.
Prints entered into AFIS are sent along and added to progressively larger haystacks, starting with the State Patrol, then the Western Identification Network, a consortium of law enforcement agencies in nine states including Washington, and finally, the FBI.
People who are arrested and booked into jail have contributed the bulk of prints stored in AFIS computers. But the system is also used to store prints of people who undergo background checks — both civilians and prospective officers — before working for law enforcement agencies; registered sex offenders; people with concealed pistol licenses; and people who need special licenses, including taxi drivers and adult entertainers.
Money raised through previous levies was used to buy digital scanners, which were first rolled out a decade ago. The money has also funded an $11.5 million, 18,000-square-foot lab, photo studio and garage housed in a Renton business park that opened in 2020, a massive upgrade from AFIS’ old lab on Airport Way South that was just 1,450 square feet, Leahy said.
The AFIS program is roughly split between its two main functions: identification and forensics.
King County has 56 Live Scan machines across the county, which can scan all 10 fingers as well as palms to capture the “friction ridges” that extend from fingertip to wrist. The machines, which also are equipped with cameras to take mug shots and photos of a person’s scars, tattoos or unique markings, are used anytime someone is arrested and booked into jail or juvenile detention.
Cupping his hands against the glass wall of the AFIS regional program’s main office in Renton, Leahy mimed peering through a car window, demonstrating how the sides of his hands touching the surface could then be compared to known finger and palm prints to potentially identify a car prowler or thief.
Through the regional program, more than 200 mobile fingerprint scanners — which only scan index fingers on each hand and don’t retain the images — have been distributed to police departments across the county. Connected to a laptop, the scanners allow for swift identification in the field, eliminating what could be an hourslong process of taking someone to a police precinct to be identified from their fingerprints.
In a demonstration last week, Judy Cordova, an educator consultant and trainer for the regional program, first scanned Leahy’s right pointer finger, then his left. It took less than two minutes for Leahy’s name, date of birth and unique AFIS number to appear on her screen.
The AFIS program is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with examiners who visually match and verify fingerprints taken from crime scenes to known fingerprints in the system. Most of the 117-member staff work out of the Renton office, though 36 people are assigned to the AFIS unit embedded in the Seattle Police Department and another 14 staff members are split between King County’s two jails in downtown Seattle and Kent. When a juvenile is arrested, someone from the AFIS unit in Seattle will drive to the youth detention center to perform fingerprint identification work.
“We keep a human in the loop because the decisions are so monumental and have a lasting effect on someone’s life,” Leahy said of the program’s print examiners.
Precious evidence
King County’s AFIS program is a regional asset that doesn’t exist in most other jurisdictions, with many of the enhanced services it provides only available at the state level, said Sheriff Patricia Cole-Tindall.
Any police agency in the county can request assistance from a seven-member AFIS mobile processing team to respond to a crime scene to search for usable prints that can then be compared to prints in the various law enforcement databases, she said.
While the team used to respond to 200 scenes a year, most of them homicides or other violent crimes, the criteria to respond has since been opened up to include crimes like residential burglaries and stolen vehicles. In 2023, the mobile team went to 3,000 crime scenes.
The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission no longer teaches how to lift fingerprints, leaving it to individual police departments to provide that training to new officers or send them to AFIS for training, according to Cole-Tindall and Marenco, the criminal investigations chief.
Finger and palm prints are what help “lock” an individual to a crime scene, whether as a suspect, victim or witness, they said.
“When you’re talking about criminal investigations, that evidence is precious evidence and you can’t take chances,” Marenco said. “Sometimes you only get one shot at getting it, so you want to bring in somebody that knows what they’re doing, knows what to look for, knows the techniques.
“I have been one of those guys at a scene that has taken a print, pulled it off and went, ‘I just screwed that up,’ ” he said. “You don’t want to do that when you’re dealing with these high profile cases that really impact people’s lives.”