Harger: I obtained the latest Bite of Seattle court filing. It’s worse than you heard

Carlos Villalba was 44. Ashley Whitehead was 56. They went to the Bite of Seattle on a Sunday evening in July, and they never came home. A 2-year-old boy took a bullet in the arm.

Yesterday, a King County juvenile court judge sent the 15-year-old arrested that night home. Ankle monitor. Electronic home detention at his father’s house, with an adult there around the clock. Last month, the court refused to release him.

“There’s a colorable claim of self-defense,” Judge Veronica Galvan said from the bench.

Translation: the judge thinks his self-defense argument could hold up. The 15-year-old has a real shot at beating the assault charge.

Two days before that ruling, prosecutors filed new details in the case. I’ve read the filing. Some of what’s in it hasn’t made the news on other outlets.

Before the festival, according to the filing, the 15-year-old met up with about 10 young men at a house. One of them, 19-year-old Junior Niko-Semo, appears to have shot a short video there. It shows the group and about 11 guns laid out on the ground. Some of them flash gang signs at the camera. The 15-year-old is in the video, along with the ghost gun police later found on him. So is a Glock 45.

Prosecutors said that Glock fired the bullet that killed Carlos Villalba. Niko-Semo’s DNA is on it. Prosecutors said Niko-Semo was one of the shooters that night. He was also the third person killed.

Then there’s Instagram. Detectives found the 15-year-old in a group chat that was active before and after the shooting. With Niko-Semo dead and the 15-year-old booked into juvenile detention, one account wrote, “We can’t keep losing bro.”

Prosecutors said the group then tried to cover its tracks. Somebody posted, “@everyone make new one,” a new chat without Niko-Semo or the 15-year-old in it.

Back in July, I wrote that this case was headed straight into Washington’s self-defense law. I wish I’d been wrong.

The Bite of Seattle shooting, 3 months later

Investigators have recovered at least four guns. The 15-year-old was carrying a Polymer80 ghost gun with a 33-round magazine. Ballistics excluded his gun from the bullets recovered from Villalba and Whitehead. Testing on the bullet that killed Whitehead couldn’t tie it to any gun. A bullet pulled from one of the wounded came from a third gun.

The 15-year-old’s public defender said the boy fired back after someone else started shooting at him and Niko-Semo. Prosecutors dispute the self-defense claim. They said both the 15-year-old and Niko-Semo fired their guns into the crowd, and that the 15-year-old was “indiscriminately firing into a crowd of innocent civilians.” Prosecutors want to try the 15-year-old as an adult. That hearing is set for November.

Investigators have said from the start that the shootout appears to be gang-related. A house full of young men, a pile of guns, gang signs for the camera, and a group chat that scrubs itself after three people die. It looks a lot like rival groups settling something at a family festival. The people who paid the highest price had nothing to do with it.

The 15-year-old is charged with first-degree assault and unlawful gun possession, and he’s presumed innocent. Nobody has been charged with killing Carlos Villalba or Ashley Whitehead. Prosecutors tie Villalba’s death to Niko-Semo’s gun, and Niko-Semo is dead. It’s possible nobody will ever stand trial for that shot.

Nobody else has been arrested. Police said they’re still looking for at least two more suspects.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for tips. In gang shootings, the people who saw the most tend to say the least. Talking to police can get you hurt, and everybody involved knows it. Remember that group chat. Three people were dead, and the first instinct was to start a new one.

Two families buried someone they loved this summer. One may never see anybody answer for it in court. The other still doesn’t know whose gun fired the shot.

WA’s self-defense law asks 1 question

Judge Galvan was following the law as it’s written. That’s the problem.

Washington’s self-defense law is built around one question: did you reasonably believe you were in danger? It says very little about the people standing behind the person you’re shooting at.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2020, rival groups opened fire on each other at Third and Pine in downtown Seattle during rush hour. A woman was killed. Seven others were shot, including a 9-year-old boy. None of them had anything to do with the feud. One shooter was acquitted after arguing he feared for his life. The other served a little more than three years.

The Legislature has had six years to fix this. It hasn’t.

Maybe somebody really was shooting at the 15-year-old first. Nobody should have to stand there and take a bullet, and the law gives him every right to make that case.

But self-defense was written to protect you from the person trying to hurt you. It was never meant to turn a crowd of families into acceptable losses.

A fix for Olympia: self-defense can’t cover the bystanders

Lawmakers could fix this in January, and I know who should file the bill. Seattle Center sits in the 36th Legislative District. That’s Sen. Noel Frame and Reps. Julia Reed and Liz Berry. The Bite of Seattle happened in their backyard, to people who came to their district for a good time. If they win re-election, they should be the ones to introduce it in the Senate and the House.

The Model Penal Code, the template many states use to write their criminal laws, already has the idea. If you’re justified in defending yourself but you recklessly hurt innocent people doing it, self-defense doesn’t cover what you did to them. You can still be charged for the bystanders.

Washington should write that into law in plain language. Defend yourself against the person shooting at you. But if you spray bullets into a crowd to do it, you answer for every innocent person you hit.

And close the gap I wrote about after Third and Pine. If you arm up with a group and walk into a public place to settle a score, you shouldn’t get to claim self-defense when the bullets start flying, and strangers go down.

Washington already does something like this. Recklessly firing from a car in a way that puts people at risk is a drive-by shooting, a class B felony, no matter who you were aiming at. A crowded food festival deserves at least as much protection as a street corner.

None of this is easy to write. A law like this can’t punish somebody who gets ambushed and fires one shot to stay alive. But hard isn’t the same as impossible.

The Bite of Seattle families are still waiting

Carlos Villalba and Ashley Whitehead went to a festival to eat. Somebody brought a war.

Three months later, one teenager is sleeping in his own bed, and two families are still waiting for somebody to answer for it.

Olympia goes back to work in January. State lawmakers should make a bill like this a priority.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.

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