A Washington police officer killed 3 people in 8 years — and faces a murder trial for the last one

SEATTLE — Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a suburban Seattle police officer charged with murder in the 2019 death of a 26-year-old man outside a supermarket — the third person the officer had killed in the past eight years.

Auburn Officer Jeff Nelson fatally shot Jesse Sarey while trying to arrest him for disorderly conduct in an interaction that lasted just 67 seconds, authorities said. Sarey had allegedly thrown things at cars.

Citing surveillance footage from nearby businesses, prosecutors said Nelson struggled with Sarey, repeatedly punching him in the head and shooting him twice. While Sarey was wounded and leaning on the ground from the first shot, which hit his upper abdomen, Nelson pulled a jammed bullet from his pistol, glanced at a nearby witness, turned back to Sarey and shot him again – this times in the forehead. , prosecutors said.

The case is the second to go to trial since Washington voters in 2018 made it easier to charge police by removing a standard that required prosecutors to prove they acted with malice; now prosecutors must prove the force was unreasonable or unnecessary. In December, jurors 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 “crouched on his knees … ready to lunge forward” before the officer fired again. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-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 settle other lawsuits 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 use 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 Nelson killed, Isaiah Obet.

Obet had reportedly broken into homes and attempted a carjacking with a knife when Nelson confronted him in 2017. Nelson released his police dog, which bit Obet and then shot the man in the torso. Obet, on the ground and still fighting the police dog, tried to get back 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. Auburn police disagreed.

“If Officer Nelson had not acted to protect the community that day, there could have been even more victims,” then-Police Chief Dan O’Neil said in a Facebook post after the family filed a lawsuit.

Nelson also shot Brian Scaman, a Vietnam veteran with mental health issues and a history of crimes, in 2011 after pulling Scaman over for a blown headlight. Scaman got out of his car with a knife and refused to drop it; Nelson shot him in the head. A judicial jury cleared Nelson of any wrongdoing.

In another case, Nelson used his patrol car in 2018 to attack Joseph Loren Allen, a man suspected of being a felon in possession of a firearm and who was fleeing police. At the time Nelson struck him, pinned him against a fence and broke both his ankles, Allen was neither armed nor was he a threat to anyone, Allen’s attorney argued.

The attorney, Mohammad Hamoudi, prepared a summary of Nelson’s use of force and filed it in federal court. Between 2012 and 2018, it was spotted about three dozen times when Nelson sent his police dog after suspects and about a dozen times when he used neck braces to render suspects unconscious.

The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which oversees police certification in the state, has moved to discipline and possibly revoke Nelson’s badge, saying he has demonstrated a pattern of “willful or reckless disregard for the rights of others.”