FALL CITY, Wash. — A hearing started on Tuesday and is set to go for several weeks to determine whether the teenage boy accused of killing nearly his entire family inside their Fall City home in 2024 can be tried as an adult.
The teen’s defense team did not deny the allegations that the teen killed his family, but rather focused on what they describe as an abusive environment inside the home that led to isolation, neglect of medical care, and fear for all five children who lived in the home.
The now-17-year-old was 15-years-old at the time in October 2024. The court has ruled that his face cannot be shown and his name will not be released in the media at this time.
Two 911 calls were made early in the morning of October 21 that year—the first from the home, where the remains of the five family members were found, and the second to a neighbor’s home, where an 11-year-old girl from the family had escaped to.
The 11-year-old avoided being killed by blocking a bullet with her hand. She was still struck in the neck and pretended to be dead when prosecutors say her older brother checked to see if she was still alive.
“She crawled through her bedroom window and she ran for her life a quarter mile to a neighbor’s house. She rang the doorbell over and over again, waking them from their sleep,” said Jamie Kvistad, one of the prosecutors on the case during the State’s opening arguments.
Prosecutors point to the bloody footprints of the defendant tracking through the house as evidence he committed the murders. They also point to his 911 call, where he said his 13-year-old now-deceased brother committed the murders and killed himself after getting in trouble with the parents the night before.
Kvistad said the autopsy on that boy showed he was shot once after his death.
“Absent his surviving sister identifying [the suspect] as the shooter. It was not until the forensic pathologist had observed his 13-year-old brother at [the] autopsy and confirmed that he suffered two gunshot wounds to the head, one of which contained no stippling, which objectively confirmed that [the suspect’s] story was fabricated.”
Stippling is bruising around gunshot wounds if the victim has blood flow. The medical examiner determined the 13-year-old did not have that on the second wound.
In these opening arguments, prosecutors have the burden to persuade Judge Veronia Galván that the suspect should be tried as an adult based on several factors that include: who the victims of the crime are, the seriousness of the crime, if the crime was perpetrated against persons or property, the maturity of the suspect, the planning or premeditation of the crime, if the defendant had a criminal history, and will weigh the protection of the public.
“This is precisely the type of case in which decline is appropriate. There are no more serious crimes, no more tragic or devastating consequences, no more compelling case for dealing with,” Kvistad said.
On that night, five people in the family were killed, including two adults and three kids-- those kids were as young as 7 and as old as 13.
The teen’s defense attorney gave a glimpse into the life inside the home for the defendant and the other children, including the surviving 11-year-old.
“From the time [the defendant] was born, his upbringing was characterized by chronic coercive control, emotional deprivation, and fear. Rules. A lot of rules. Those rules stemmed from a dangerous form of religion that turned abusive. A form of religion that has harmed many, including [the suspect’s] parents and his siblings,” said Amy Parker, one of the teen’s defense attorneys.
Parker spoke to letters from neighbors that described children in the home often asking their children for extra food. They recalled seeing the defendant hoarding food outside of the home because they didn’t believe he was eating and described abuse from both parents.
Defense attorneys showed pictures of the defendant’s bruised face and said he had suffered as many as 12 blows to the head-- one that knocked him unconscious for more than 30 minutes.
“They would all be put in a line and hit until a child confessed to whatever the indiscretion it was that [their mother] perceived. She would hit the kids sometimes 50 times in a day,” Parker said. “[The defendant] quickly learned how to be perfect, but watching and hearing his siblings get beaten was harder than being beaten himself.”
Parker described “secular psychology” as sinful or demonic in the eyes of the family’s parents, especially their father. The defendant’s last doctor appointment was noted in 2019 as Parker said no one in the family had been to the doctor since 2020.
The suspect’s grandmother described to defense attorneys that he looked sick and “lethargic” for weeks leading up to the murders. He was diagnosed with pneumonia, treated and recovered within days of arriving in juvenile detention and almost immediately gained 35 pounds.
“That’s an exceptionally rapid weight gain. Likely he was not only significantly underweight, but also significantly dehydrated when he entered detention,” Parker said.
The timeline of his pneumonia matches the timeline of neighbors reporting the defendant pacing up and down the home’s driveway, talking to himself often in gibberish and posting conspiracies on his Discord chat.
Parker pointed to mental health in the family—the mother was diagnosed in her late teens with anxiety and depression after being abused by her father, and one of his grandfathers was diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder, all of which make the defendant more likely to have mental health issues himself, experts said.
Two of the defense team’s psychiatrists have diagnosed the teen with bipolar disorder after over 37 hours of meeting with him over the past two years.
Prosecutors did not dispute the mental health diagnoses during the hearing Tuesday.
“When he described his experience to Dr. Peterson, Dr. Peterson described it as a textbook example of a progression into mental illness, and he found his report credible and reliable,” Parker said.
This has led to all of the defendant’s grandparents and some of his aunts and uncles writing letters and sitting behind him in support during the hearing.
One of the grandparents told the defense team about the similarities in the stories of the defendant and the surviving child.
“If [the defendant] is describing abuse and [the surviving child] is, and they’re not talking to each other, it’s hard to argue that that’s not what was going on,” Parker said.
The decline hearing is scheduled to last several weeks into October.