At least 17 children under 18 have been killed in homicides so far this year in King County, more than double the number of juvenile homicide victims in all of 2023, the county’s most deadly year.
The latest casualty was a 15-year-old boy who was gunned down in the parking lot of the Brookside Village Apartments in unincorporated Auburn last week. The King County Sheriff’s Office has not yet identified a suspect.
Four other deaths of children this year are also being investigated as homicides, but the King County Medical Examiner’s Office is still determining the manners of death, according to prosecutors.
John Castleton and Mary Barbosa, senior deputy prosecutors who co-chair their office’s Most Dangerous Offender Program, which sends deputy prosecutors to every suspected homicide scene in the county, said they can’t say exactly why the first half of the year has seen such a dramatic shift to more young victims and suspects.
Easy access to guns, the proliferation of untraceable ghost guns and “switches” that turn semiautomatic handguns into machine guns, widespread use of extended and drum magazines and young people’s love of gun content on social media all appear to be fueling the deadly trend, they said. The desire and willingness to fire a gun also seems to be increasing among teens and young adults.
“It is very noticeable,” Castleton said. “It’s tough because we’re seeing this more than we ever have before.”
All but one of the child homicide victims was killed by gunfire, according to a Seattle Times database compiled with preliminary information from police, prosecutors and the medical examiner. By contrast, 65% of this year’s 46 adult homicide victims were fatally shot.
Two of the victims were girls, and the rest were boys, including the youngest victims; a 2-year-old caught in the crossfire of a Federal Way gunfight in April and an infant who was allegedly shot by his father in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood the next month.
Though violent crime is down and the overall number of homicides has slowed compared with last year, prosecutors are also seeing an increase in the number of young murder suspects.
Barbosa noted that in all of 2016, prosecutors filed nine murder cases against kids under 18, “which was very unusual.”
Prosecutors have already matched that record a little over midway through 2024, she said.
Most recently, Derreon Johnson, 16, was charged last week with second-degree murder and three counts of second-degree assault. He is accused of firing 16 rounds from a 9 mm handgun at three teenagers in a stolen car outside a Skyway apartment complex in May. One of those rounds pierced the wall of a building, went through a headboard and killed 10-year-old Anfa Mahamud as she slept in her bed, charging papers say.
Homicides in King County surged in 2020, coinciding with the onset of the COVID pandemic, and spiked to more than 140 homicides last year. But those killings mostly involved adult victims over 30.
There have been 22 fewer homicides this year compared with this time in 2023, but juveniles and young adults ages 18 to 25 account for more than 40% of the county’s 63 homicide victims — up significantly from the roughly 24% of last year’s homicides.
In Seattle, police went 48 days without responding to a homicide in the spring — besting their 35-day streak in winter 2023, The Times’ data shows. There have been 28 homicides committed in the city so far this year, not counting the March fatal shootings of two 16-year-old boys on Interstate 5 in the University District that are being investigated by the Washington State Patrol. The Seattle victims include four juveniles and seven young adults, ages 20 to 25.
Elsewhere in the county, three teens under 18 have been fatally shot in Auburn, two in Renton and one each in SeaTac, Kent and Federal Way. A 15-year-old boy was fatally shot in Burien in February but because he and a 15-year-old friend were alone in a room at the time of the shooting and the other boy exercised his right to remain silent, the medical examiner was unable to determine whether his death was a homicide.
Interim Seattle police Chief Sue Rahr thinks the lingering effects of school closures and interruptions during the pandemic coupled with the “ridiculous availability of guns” is driving a lot of the violence.
There used to be a perception, she said, that kids who carried guns were intent on committing a crime.
“I don’t think that’s the case anymore,” Rahr said. “I think there are a lot of kids carrying guns for protection and that is a frightening, frightening development because if you have a volatile teenage mind and a gun, I think it happens so quickly and then there’s no take-backs.”
Police have worked to disrupt street-racing gatherings that draw young people and sometimes involve gunfire. They’ve also investigated gun battles waged on Aurora Avenue North between teenage boys and young men involved in the drug and sex trades, she said.
With guns so easy to trade and transport, police are finding the weapons increasingly used in multiple shootings.
Seattle police had seized fewer guns by the end of June than in the first half of 2023 — 868 versus 1,532. Of those taken off the streets this year, 92 were tested and 51% of them were found to have been used in two shooting incidents, with another 26% used in five or more shootings, according to SPD data.
As of Thursday, officers had recovered 3,425 shell casings from shooting scenes, nearly 250 more than had been collected as evidence by this time last year, the data shows. There have also been 11 scenes where 50-plus casings were recovered, up from nine at this time last year.
In one June gun battle alone, officers recovered more than 160 casings fired from 11 different guns at 20th Avenue South and South Main Street, near Pratt Park. At least two people were hit and taken to local hospitals, though they refused to speak with officers, and several nearby apartment buildings were struck by bullets, according to SPD. Luckily, none of the buildings’ residents were injured.
“There is so much gunfire all over the city where, thankfully, no one is hit. There’s a ridiculous amount of gunfire and it feels like kids playing with guns, like it’s some sort of game,” Rahr said. “I don’t know how to get my arms around that because it’s a volatile problem. … There are some areas where it happens more than others but there’s no way to predict where a shooting is going to happen.”
“It never used to be like that”
King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Jamie Kvistad, who helped launch the juvenile division’s Safer Schools Strategy at the beginning of the year, sees school districts struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath to reconnect with students and parents and address their student populations’ mental and behavioral health issues.
Prosecutors are now working with districts’ security teams and have sent out roughly 70 notifications to alert them when a student has been charged with a gun-related felony. They can also help secure warrants and with other interventions to get guns away from kids.
“It’s not a fair expectation for schools to deal with this on their own,” she said. “Schools are not designed to do threat assessments, schools are not designed to come up with these comprehensive safety plans for not just targeted violence but reactive violence.”
In Washington, nearly 67,000 kids were dropped from public school rolls between the 2019-20 school year and the 2022-23 school year — and while many of them transferred to private schools or homeschooling, plenty of others have fallen off any kind of official radar, Kvistad said.
Many of the criminal cases that hit Kvistad’s desk involve kids who, after a certain number of absences and no response from their parents, were simply dropped from school rolls.
“I do feel like there’s this avalanche coming because so many children have been displaced,” she said.
Athletic programs have also been casualties to the pandemic, said Dom Davis, the founder and executive director of Community Passageways, a community nonprofit that works to keep young people, particularly Black and brown kids, out of the criminal legal system.
Basketball, football and track programs have all but disappeared in Seattle’s Central District and South End — and with them, practices, workout sessions and out-of-town tournaments that can stave off attempts to draw young men into the streets, Davis said.
During the pandemic, “we had kids sitting up on their devices all day, watching all the gang life stuff, because that’s what gets promoted on social media — gang, gang, gang, gang,” he said.
Instead of being complimented for their hard work or good plays — and getting a resulting hit of serotonin from those accomplishments — Davis said it’s switched to, “Oh, he’s a hitter, he’s a stepper, he’s a shooter.”
“Now that camaraderie, that positive affirmation, comes from a negative place but you’re still getting the same chemicals in your brain,” he said.
At the same time, the very definition of a gang has shifted. Gone are the hierarchies, fixed affiliations and neighborhood divisions, Davis said, citing the previous rivalry between gangs in the Central District and the South End as largely a thing of the past.
He estimated there are 15 different gangs of varying sizes in a 20-block radius in the Central District and many of the shootings in the neighborhood involve people from the Central District, a phenomenon that’s playing out to a certain extent in South Seattle, too.
“Now you have inner beef going on in the Central District and they’re shooting at each other,” Davis said. “It never used to be like that.”
Six years ago, Davis was able to bring a group of OGs — “original gangsters” — from the two neighborhoods together to agree to a peace treaty. He said that’s not an option anymore.
“There’s OGs, but there’s only a handful,” Davis said. “There’s all these other little, small gangs and the OGs are saying, ‘These little dudes don’t listen to us. They ain’t listening. They do their own thing.’ ”