Seattle, Washington. –
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a suburban Seattle police officer charged with murder in the death of a 26-year-old man outside a convenience store in 2019 — the third person the officer had killed in the last eight years.
Auburn Officer Jeff Nelson shot and killed Jesse Sarey while attempting to arrest him for disorderly conduct in an interaction that lasted just 67 seconds, authorities said. Sarey had reportedly been throwing things at cars.
Citing surveillance video from nearby businesses, prosecutors said Nelson struggled with Sarey, punched him repeatedly in the head and shot him twice. As Sarey was wounded and laid to the ground by the first shot, which hit the upper abdomen, Nelson pulled a jammed bullet from his gun, looked at a nearby witness, turned to Sarey and shot him again, this time in forehead. , prosecutors said.
The case is the second to go to trial since Washington voters in 2018 made it easier to prosecute police by eliminating a standard that required prosecutors to prove they acted with malice; Now, prosecutors must show that the level of force was unreasonable or unnecessary. In December, voters acquitted three Tacoma police officers in the 2020 death of Manuel Ellis.
Nelson later said in a written statement that he believed Sarey had a knife and posed a threat before the first shot, and that Sarey was on his knees “in a crouch…ready to jump forward” before the officer fired again. . He has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder and first-degree assault.
Nelson, an Iraq War veteran, joined the department in 2008.
The city of Auburn paid Sarey’s family $4 million to settle a civil rights claim and has paid nearly $2 million more to resolve other litigation over Nelson’s actions as a police officer.
The trial, before King County Superior Court Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, is expected to last several weeks. Gaines has ruled that jurors will not hear evidence about Nelson’s prior uses of deadly force or about Sarey’s history of drug use.
In one of those earlier cases, the city of Auburn agreed to pay $1.25 million to the family of another man killed by Nelson, Isaiah Obet.
Obet had reportedly been breaking into homes and attempting to carry out a carjacking with a knife when Nelson confronted him in 2017. Nelson unleashed his police dog, which bit Obet and then shot the man in the torso. Obet, on the ground and still fighting the police dog, began to try to get up and Nelson shot him again in the head, police said.
Lawyers for Obet’s family said he posed no threat to anyone when he was shot. The Auburn Police Department disagreed.
“If Officer Nelson had not acted that day to protect the community, there could have been additional victims,” then-Police Chief Dan O’Neil said in a Facebook post after the family filed a lawsuit.
Nelson also shot and killed Brian Scaman, a mentally challenged Vietnam veteran with a history of serious crimes, in 2011 after stopping Scaman for a burned out headlight. Scaman got out of his car with a knife and refused to let go; Nelson shot him in the head. An inquest jury cleared Nelson of any wrongdoing.
In another case, Nelson used his patrol car in 2018 to hit Joseph Loren Allen, a man suspected of being a felon in possession of a firearm who was fleeing police. At the time Nelson struck him, pinning him against a fence and breaking both of his ankles, Allen was not armed and posed no threat to anyone, Allen’s attorney argued.
The attorney, Mohammad Hamoudi, compiled a summary of Nelson’s uses of force and presented it in federal court. He observed about three dozen times between 2012 and 2018 when Nelson sent his police dog after suspects and about a dozen times when he used neck restraints to render suspects unconscious.
The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which oversees police certification in the state, has taken disciplinary action and possibly revoked Nelson’s badge, saying he has shown a pattern of “an intentional or reckless disregard for criminals.” rights of others”.