Friday, May 30, 2008

No Warrant, No Search!

Driver charged with vehicular homicide

P-I STAFF

A 26-year-old Redmond man was legally drunk when his vehicle struck a motorcycle on state Route 202 on Monday, killing its rider, King County prosecutors said.

Prosecutors charged Kyle Dalan on Thursday with vehicular homicide. They said he only recently had his driver's license reinstated, on a probationary basis, after a 2006 drunken driving conviction.

Dalan's Geo Tracker drifted across the center line near Fall City on Monday afternoon, crashing into Mark Stolle's motorcycle. Investigators say the 74-year-old Samammish man, who tried to get out of the vehicle's path, died within minutes.

Dalan told police he'd been trying to adjust furniture he was transporting and didn't realize his vehicle had crossed into oncoming traffic, according to court documents.

Dalan remained in the King County Jail Thursday on $250,000 bail.

Police nab suspected carjackers

By HECTOR CASTRO
P-I REPORTER

Seattle police nabbed three young men suspected of taking part in an early morning carjacking.

The victim called 911 around 1:20 a.m. to report that his 1995 Honda Accord had been taken from him at gunpoint in the 7500 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way South.

Officers responding to the area soon spotted the stolen vehicle driving north on Interstate 5, and stopped the vehicle near the Spokane Street exit.

Police took three men in their 20s into custody.

Spokesman Jeff Kappel said the incident remains under investigation.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Woman suffers minor injury in drive-by shooting

By Seattle Times staff

Police are investigating a drive-by shooting early this morning in South Seattle that left one woman injured.

At 3:39 a.m., a 911 call came in reporting that shots had been fired near 32nd Avenue South and South Atlantic Street, said police department spokesman Jeff Kappel.

It appears that two groups of people, in two separate cars, were arguing, he said. As the exchange grew more heated, someone from one car fired shots at the other vehicle three times.

The car that was hit sped off to a nearby residence and someone — it's not clear who — called 911, Kappel said. After officers arrived, they found the woman in the car had suffered a minor injury to her back. It's unclear if the injury was caused by a bullet or glass shrapnel, Kappel said.

Police have no description of the other car or the people inside it. Gang unit detectives are "actively investigating," Kappel said.
By Seattle Times staff

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Seattle man sentenced to 20 years for officer's slaying

By Natalie Singer
Seattle Times staff reporter

A 31-year-old Seattle man was sentenced to 20 years in prison this morning for the 1994 slaying of Seattle police Officer Antonio Terry. Quentin Ervin was serving time for a second-degree-murder conviction in Terry's slaying when the case was refiled as aggravated first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder after King County prosecutors last year were given a green light to pursue the more serious charges by a state Supreme Court decision.

Ervin last week pleaded guilty to the first-degree-murder charge, and in exchange prosecutors reduced the charge from aggravated murder and dropped an attempted-murder charge.

Senior Deputy Prosecutor Scott O'Toole said his office would seek a 20-year sentence.

On June 4, 1994, Terry stopped to help Ervin and his friend Eric Smiley, whose vehicle had broken down on an Interstate 5 offramp. Terry was in plainclothes when he was fatally shot with a bullet prosecutors said came from a gun fired either by Ervin or Smiley.

"To this day we don't know who fired the fatal shot," O'Toole said after Ervin pleaded guilty.

Smiley was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and was sentenced to 33 years in prison.

Ervin originally faced three separate charges: aggravated first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and second-degree felony murder — based on the commission of an assault during the crime.

A jury was required to deliberate each charge individually. According to the jurors' instructions, if they couldn't agree or found Ervin not guilty on one charge, they were to move on to the next, less serious charge. If they reached a guilty verdict for any charge, they were to stop.

Unable to come to a verdict on aggravated first-degree murder and then on the attempted first-degree-murder charge after five weeks of deliberation, jurors convicted Ervin in 1996 of second-degree felony murder.

But in 2002, a Supreme Court ruling known as the Andress decision nullified Ervin's conviction by throwing out the law that covered the felony-murder crime. In Andress, the justices said that an assault leading to an unintended death cannot be a murder but instead must be prosecuted as manslaughter.

The state decided to retry him on the first two charges — aggravated first-degree and attempted first-degree murder.

Information from Seattle Times archives is included in this report