Defense team accuses investigators of lying about visit to Fall City murder house

FALL CITY, Wash. — The defense team for the 15-year-old boy charged with killing his family in Fall City alleges sheriff’s investigators lied when they claimed items inside the home were altered or removed during a visit by defense attorneys last month.

Kristen Gestaut, a private defense attorney now representing the 15-year-old, said photos taken by the investigators prove it was law enforcement, not the public defenders, who moved the items.

“Law enforcement seems to be simply grasping at straws for evidence of malfeasance without any proof and with clear evidence to the contrary,” Gestaut wrote in a memo filed this week. “While the prosecuting attorney acted with apparent recklessness, multiple King County Sheriff's Office detectives acted with what can only be viewed as an intentional disregard for the truth, their oaths, the authority of this court, and public safety itself. Their actions are unconscionable and merit this Court’s fullest condemnation.”

The back-and-forth allegations stem from Oct. 29 when the defense team was granted access to the home where the Humiston family was murdered on Oct. 21. A 15-year-old boy is accused of shooting his entire family in the middle of the night, then calling the police and trying to frame his younger brother for the killings.

The defense team petitioned a judge to give them access to take scans of the inside of the home, and they specifically requested law enforcement not be allowed to supervise them during the visit.

The request was granted, and the defense team had a 10-hour window to work inside the house. A judge, however, put strict limits on the visit and told the defense they were not allowed to remove items from the house or conduct searches through the victims’ belongings.

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In a Nov 5. court filing, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office accused the defense of violating the judge’s order during their visit. Specifically, prosecutors said a bottle of Clorox wipes was missing from the house, and backpacks belonging to the victims were opened or moved.

“It is clear that defense counsel and their agents exceeded the permitted scope of their search under the Court’s order,” Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jason Brookhyser wrote in the motion.

KOMO News was the first media outlet to report on the accusations in a story on Nov. 15. Since that report, the allegations have been covered by national and international media outlets, which Gestaut addressed in her memo this week.

“Predictably, the media has made much of the state’s claim that defense absconded with relevant evidence from an active crime scene, especially given the State’s request that Defense be required to return the infamous wipes,” Gestaut wrote.

She alleges the King County Sheriff’s Office own photos from the home show the ‘missing’ Clorox wipes are inside a closet in the home.

“All one needs to do is to look to the last photograph in that folder, as it depicts the Clorox wipes on the floor near those backpacks, which, again, had been moved by law enforcement prior to Defense’s entry into the residence,” Gestaut said. “It is equally absurd and insincere for the prosecution to levy such a searing accusation against former defense counsel for removing evidence from a crime scene in reference to a bottle of Clorox wipes that has no apparent relation to this incident. This would be true even if the accusations were accurate, but, of course, they are not. It was law enforcement who removed said ‘evidence’ from its original location, placing the container of wipes in a closet.”

Gestaut said the allegations raised by prosecutors have caused a ‘witch hunt’ against the teen’s former public defenders.

“These allegations, which the Court will hopefully dismiss as completely false, stoked the inevitable flames of rushed judgment that lick at every high-profile case until the proposition of fair proceedings is burned away by forces beyond the Court’s control,” she wrote. “Given this case is barely a month old, we are perilously close to that point, if not past it already. If an alleged quintuple familicide is an unusual case even by high-profile standards, the tacit (or, arguably, overt) suggestion that the defendant’s attorney was nefariously putting her thumb on the scales of justice by tampering with evidence is truly a black swan event that will sit in the mind of potential jurors like nothing else can.”

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will be back in court on Monday for a motions hearing, at which time the allegations about misconduct may be addressed. The teen is facing five counts of aggravated murder in juvenile court, though prosecutors have petitioned to move the case to the adult court system. A decision is expected to be made sometime next summer.

The King County Department of Public Defense was originally handling the teen’s case before transferring it to Gestaut’s private firm. The public defenders insist the accusations from the Oct. 29 visit had nothing to do with them passing the case off.

“Unfortunately, the King County Department of Public Defense did not have adequate resources to responsibly defend this case in-house,” public defender Amy Parker wrote in a memo this week. “Any implication that there was any nefarious reason for our withdrawal is false.”