A 16-year-old boy was charged Tuesday with second-degree murder in connection with the May killing of a 10-year-old girl who was hit by a stray bullet inside her bedroom, according to King County prosecutors.
The girl was struck in the head by a bullet that came through her bedroom wall while she was asleep in bed next to her younger siblings, 3 and 5. King County prosecutors are charging the defendant, Derreon Johnson, as an adult. He’s also charged with three counts of second-degree assault for allegedly shooting at three other people in a car at the Creston Point Apartments in Skyway on May 23.
The Seattle Times typically does not name juvenile criminal defendants unless they are charged as adults.
According to a probable cause determination filed by a King County Sheriff’s Office detective, the girl’s mother heard her cry out from her bedroom around 2 a.m. and found her bleeding from the head. She later died from her injuries at Harborview Medical Center.
Surveillance video revealed a Kia Soul drove into the complex about 15 minutes before the first 911 call and six people walked from another building toward the car, according to the probable cause document. The shooting itself was not caught on video.
Responding officers found 16 spent 9-mm casings around the walkway of the building, and they located two bullet holes that went through the victim’s bedroom wall in line with the direction of fire, the detective wrote. Ballistics testing demonstrated the casings found outside and the bullets that killed the girl were fired from the same gun, according to the probable cause document.
The Sheriff’s Office later found the Kia had been stolen from Tukwila International Boulevard Station just hours before the shooting and recovered it the day after, the detective wrote. Fingerprints identified a 17-year-old who had been in the Kia, who told police he was at the apartment to buy marijuana when he realized someone was pointing a gun at him and his friends, according to the probable cause document, and they drove away while the person fired the gun.
Another witness who had been arrested in July for his role in an unrelated shooting at the same apartment complex told detectives he knew about the homicide and that his friends, one of whom he said was named Derreon, told him they had recently shot and hit a “little girl,” the detective wrote. That person identified two other witnesses he had been with, who told detectives during an interview that they were there for the marijuana handoff when a person they knew as “Rollie,” but whose real name is “Derreon Johnson,” started “letting off shots,” the detective wrote.
On June 22, video of another shooting at Creston Point outside the same building captured a male firing a gun in the air. Police recovered 10 casings from the scene and ballistic testing showed they matched the casings recovered outside the girl’s bedroom.
Prosecutors allege public posts on Johnson’s Instagram, which had a username listed as “Rollie frm da p,” showed him posing with handguns in a similar outfit to what the person was wearing on surveillance video captured the night the girl was killed. The witness who was in jail identified Johnson as the person in the Instagram posts and told detectives the gun would be in unit B-402 of the building, according to the probable cause document. The Sheriff’s Office served a search warrant on July 10 in the unit, which Johnson was allegedly going in and out of, and found a gun that test fired a casing matching the casings found at the homicide scene.
Johnson is being held in lieu of posting $2 million bail. At the time of the shooting, he was on a deferred disposition in juvenile court for unlawful possession of a firearm for a December 2023 incident. Under a deferred disposition, youth can be sentenced to 12 months of supervision in the community with conditions of compliance. If they follow the conditions and don’t commit another crime, the charge can be dismissed at the end of the year.