SEATTLE — A 19-year-old Tacoma man was arrested and charged last week with murder, accused of fatally shooting an unarmed homeless man at a small encampment off Seattle’s Rainier Avenue South in July after taunting and harassing the camp’s sleeping residents, King County prosecutors say.
Kahmari Hale was arrested Oct. 29 at his Tacoma apartment, three months and a day after he allegedly gunned down Johnathan Stutson, 34, at 25th Avenue South and South Walker Street, where six tents had been pitched along the shoulder, charging papers say. Charged the next day with second-degree murder, Hale remains jailed in lieu of $2 million bail.
King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Don Raz wrote in charging documents that when Stutson “verbally stood up to” Hale and his friends for their taunts, Hale fired 13 bullets at him, striking him at least six times.
“To kill someone who was simply calling you out on your own bad behavior reveals the defendant to be a person of extreme capacity to inflict injury and death on others with no consideration of the human cost,” Raz wrote of Hale.
A violent pattern
Stutson is one of at least six homeless people who have been victims of homicides in Seattle this year, part of a larger, national pattern of extreme violence — beatings, rapes and homicides — targeting people experiencing homelessness. At least 588 unhoused people have been killed in violent attacks between 2000 and 2023, crimes that appear to be motivated by perpetrators’ bias against those experiencing homelessness and the ability to target homeless people with relative ease, according to a report released in May by the National Coalition for the Homeless.
In King County, homicides of homeless people have dramatically increased. From 2017 to 2021, the number hovered around nine per year. In 2022, that number doubled, and has stayed high since.
Earlier this year, prosecutors charged Liam Kryger, 25, with two counts of premeditated first-degree murder for allegedly killing two Seattle men. Paul Ewell, 68, and Daravuth Van, 52, were presumably killed by ax blows to their heads while they were nestled in their makeshift beds 12 days and less than a mile apart from each other in February.
Also in February, a man who the King County Medical Examiner’s Office has been unable to identify died from blunt force trauma at a homeless encampment at Third Avenue and Columbia Street. In May, David Schonfeld, 61, walked out of an encampment near Airport Way South and South Horton Street, his chest riddled with bird shot. He died nearly three weeks later at Harborview Medical Center.
There have been no arrests in the men’s killings.
Workers clearing a homeless encampment near the Interstate 5 and Interstate 90 interchange in September found the remains of 37-year-old Shannon Reeder in a suitcase. Steven Nguyen, 57, a resident of the encampment, was charged last month with second-degree murder.
For people experiencing homelessness, exposure to violence is “constant, pervasive and just part of their everyday experience,” Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an interview earlier this year.
Stigma, discrimination and hateful language directed at people experiencing homelessness are dehumanizing, which perhaps makes it easier for perpetrators to target them, she said.
“When we talked to people, they described really just feeling like sitting ducks,” Kushel said. “When you are asleep in an outdoor space, you are just completely vulnerable to violence.”
No apparent connection
Based on witness statements and video-surveillance footage, Seattle police detectives investigating Stutson’s July 28 homicide determined a red Kia Optima had been in the drive-thru lane at a McDonald’s restaurant at 4 a.m. before it drove past the encampment twice, then pulled over on its third pass, charging papers say.
The first time, an occupant of the car yelled out, “Wake up!” and a woman was heard yelling back that people were trying to sleep, the charges say. The second time the car went by, someone threatened to “air out” the encampment — a euphemism for shooting it up, according to charging documents.
When the Kia pulled over, three men — later identified as Hale, his brother and a friend — got out of the car and walked to the encampment. Stutson chastised them for making “dumbass threats” and said none of them were “hard,” the charges say.
The three men walked behind a building, out of view of the camera that captured the sound of 13 gunshots, then ran back to their car, which traveled north on Rainier Avenue South before police arrived, charging papers say.
The Kia’s license plate number ultimately led detectives to one of Hale’s friends, who was pulled over in Tacoma a few days after Stutson’s homicide for speeding, according to the charges. The friend later identified himself and the others present at the scene from still photographs taken from the surveillance footage, the charges say.
After Hale was arrested last week, police say he contradicted himself in an interview with detectives about when he learned Stutson had died and claimed he was afraid Stutson would harm him, according to charging papers.
Detectives “did not find any connection” between Stutson and the Kia’s occupants and no weapons were found on or near Stutson’s body, the charges say.
Hale is scheduled to be arraigned Nov. 14.
