SEATTLE — Two years and roughly 40 miles separate the theft of a Smith & Wesson handgun and its use in an unprovoked Belltown neighborhood shooting that killed a pregnant woman and injured her husband as they sat in their car, waiting for a red light to change.
There’s no way to know how many times the 9mm exchanged hands as it made its way north from Lakewood to Seattle, but a crime lab report shows it was also used in at least one other violent crime: a drive-by shooting in Tacoma in August 2021.
The sequence illustrates how firearms circulate in the local black market, with frequent sales or trades occurring once weapons are used in crimes — often by people who aren’t legally allowed to possess them, said Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz.
Diaz said roughly one-third of the guns Seattle police recover in any given year have been reported stolen, usually in residential burglaries and, to a lesser extent, car prowls. The department recovered 629 guns through the end of May, a number that includes firearms taken from subjects of domestic violence and extreme risk protection orders.
That’s the highest number of guns the Seattle Police Department has recovered in any five-month period, putting the department on pace to top its 2018 record of 1,408 recovered in a single year, Diaz said.
The people who steal guns and other valuables to quickly pawn for cash aren’t typically the same people pulling the trigger, Diaz said. Instead, “it’s actually a smaller group of people who are willing to harm others, and that’s where our focus has to be,” he said.
In the wake of the June 13 shooting in Belltown that killed 34-year-old Eina Kwon and her unborn daughter, and injured her husband, Sung Kwon, Diaz announced the formation of a task force intended to stem gun violence, which typically spikes in the summer.
Made up of 50 or so officers and detectives pulled from other assignments, members of the new task force within a week headed off a credible threat to an unspecified “nightlife event” at a Pioneer Square club.
They arrested a 17-year-old Tacoma boy June 22 and seized a semiautomatic rifle, a revolver, ammunition and a drum magazine, according to a post on the department’s online blotter.
They also recovered a stolen 9mm handgun and a drum magazine during the arrest of a wanted man stopped for an alleged traffic violation in the Rainier Valley two days later.
Automatic firing
Officers are increasingly seizing drum magazines, which can hold up to 50 rounds, as they go about their work, Diaz said. Police have also seen semiautomatic weapons modified to fire automatically.
“You have a magazine that’s able to (hold) a lot of ammunition, and with a little bit of modification, you’ve now made that handgun into (a weapon) that is no different from an automatic rifle,” he said. “Fifty rounds is a lot of rounds. … That’s a lot of damage they can cause.”
Diaz said officers are encountering far more shooting scenes with 10 or more shell casings. They collected over 20 casings from a recent shooting at Rainier Avenue South and South Massachusetts Street, for example. And last summer, Diaz said, a 14-year-old girl was critically injured in a Sodo shooting that left at least 100 casings scattered outside a bar near T-Mobile Park.
Another troubling trend is the number of guns police are taking off street-level drug dealers, something Diaz said wasn’t the case when he worked undercover narcotics operations earlier in his career.
“It’s getting a lot more violent and a lot more volatile,” he said of the city’s drug scene.
One ongoing investigation into a regional drug-trafficking organization that predates the new SPD task force illustrates the illegal, off-the-books exchange of guns used in Seattle-area crimes.
A federal complaint says Marquise Tolbert, a 27-year-old man acquitted of murder and assault charges in a 2020 gun battle in downtown Seattle, told another man he’d been shot in the arm during a late-May gunfight in Des Moines and was looking for a buyer for the XD-Elite pistol he fired in that shooting.
After selling the XD-Elite to an unknown buyer, Tolbert tried to buy a new gun from Parchey Kelly, a 29-year-old Issaquah man who investigators arrested before he and Tolbert could complete their deal, the complaint says. Police found three handguns and $14,000 in cash in Kelly’s car and seized another gun and ammunition from his apartment, according to the complaint.
Investigators say Tolbert then reached out to Kisean Coleman, 23, who arranged to sell him a Ruger 5.7 pistol in Renton. After the transaction, investigators followed Tolbert to Tacoma, where they arrested him on a Department of Corrections warrant, the complaint says.
Investigators searched Tolbert’s apartment and seized the loaded Ruger and a second magazine from his bedroom closet, according to the complaint.
Kelly and Coleman have each been charged with one count of unlawful possession of a firearm. Tolbert faces two such counts. Though Kelly was released last week, Tolbert and Coleman remain in custody at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac.
Testing tells each gun’s story
When Seattle police seize guns or collect shell casings from shooting scenes, they submit them for testing in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, known as NIBIN. Run by the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the program uses automated imaging technology to match ballistic evidence to crime scenes across the country.
So far this year, there have been 237 NIBIN hits to Seattle shootings, linking the weapons to shootings in cities as far away as Portland, Diaz said. In over 100 cases, the same gun was used in two shootings, while more than 50 firearms were linked to three incidents and 75 were tied to four or more shootings, he said.
Officers have recovered 77 of those guns, or 32 percent of the weapons that generated Seattle’s NIBIN hits, according to Diaz, who likened the technology to DNA for guns.
One of those 77 guns is the Smith & Wesson 9mm that a Seattle police officer found under a parked car shortly after Eina and Sung Kwon were shot while waiting for the light to change at Fourth Avenue and Lenora Street. It was sent for NIBIN testing the same day.
Cordell Goosby, 30, was quickly arrested and pleaded not guilty last week to first-degree murder and attempted murder charges. He remains jailed in lieu of $10 million bail.
The 9mm was stolen in April 2021 during a gathering at a Lakewood house described in a police report as a “high crime location” known for drug activity and the trafficking of stolen property, according to documents obtained from the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
The gun’s owner told officers he had concealed the firearm beneath his clothes but somehow another man knew he was carrying and insisted on seeing the weapon, the report says. Fearing he would be assaulted or robbed if he didn’t comply, the report says, the gun owner handed the weapon over.
Four months later, the 9mm was used in a drive-by shooting at a house just south of Tacoma’s Lincoln High School, the documents show.
