DNA evidence led SPD Homicide detectives to a person of interest and ultimate arrest of a 46-year-old man in South Carolina this week in connection with a double murder at a Belltown apartment in January 2016.
On January 25, 2016, Seattle police responded to the Bell Tower apartment complex in the 2200 block of 1st Avenue after receiving a request to check on a tenant. Officers entered the apartment and found two men, 65 and 58 years old, dead inside. The King County Medical Examiner ruled the deaths as homicides.
SPD Homicide detectives have been investigating the case ever since, and received a break in the case recently when they received a notification from the nationwide Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which linked the DNA collected at the Belltown crime scene to a potential suspect.
The CODIS notification identified a 46-year-old man—who recently provided a DNA sample as part of an unrelated felony case in Greenville County, South Carolina— as a match for DNA evidence collected in the Belltown case.
Earlier this week, on June 12th, SPD detectives flew to South Carolina where, with the assistance of the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office, SPD Real Time Crime Center and King County Prosecutors, they were able to track down and interview the man. They have since identified him as the suspect in the Belltown double homicide.
Police are now working with the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to charge and extradite the man and bring him back to Seattle to face charges.