Defense team accused of altering crime scene of Fall City family murders

KING COUNTY, Wash. — Prosecutors allege a team of public defenders violated a court order when they were allowed unsupervised access to the home where a Fall City family was murdered last month.

In a motion filed on Nov. 5, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office claimed there is photographic evidence showing items from the home were altered or removed while defense attorneys for the 15-year-old boy charged with the murders were inside.

The boy is accused of killing his parents, Mark and Sarah Humiston, as well as his younger siblings; Benjamin, 13, Joshua, 9, and 7-year-old Katheryn. A judge has previously ordered the media not name the defendant publicly.

“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.

The boy’s attorneys had access to the house on Oct. 29, one day after Judge Veronica Galvan granted their motion to enter the home without supervision by the sheriff’s office.

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Galvan gave four members of the defense team a 10-hour window to take pictures and conduct a 3D scan inside the home, as well as search the boy’s bedroom. The order prohibited the attorneys from removing items from the home, or searching through "file cabinets, containers, drawers, digital devices, and the like."

“The defense team may only view items that are in plain view,” Galvan wrote in the order.

The King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) documented the home before and after the defense team’s access, according to the prosecution’s memo.

The memo alleges a bottle of Clorox wipes from the home is missing, and backpacks belonging to the child victims were opened or moved. The prosecutor’s office is seeking an order to compel the defense to turn over all material they collected or documented during their time in the house.

"The state is particularly interested in those materials obtained on Oct. 29, because KCSO was not permitted to observe defense counsel or their agents as they spent hours in the residence, and a comparison of the photographs taken in the front entryway of the residence, as well as from the boys’ and girls’ rooms before and after their presence there suggests that they exceeded the scope Certification and Motion to Compel Discovery permitted by the Court’s order,” Brookhyser wrote. “The State is entitled to possession of those materials in the due course of counsels’ reciprocal discovery obligations, and the Court should also have access to those materials in order to properly determine whether counsel complied with the presumption that they would behave as ‘officers of the court’ when granted unmonitored access to the scene.”

Prosecutors have taken steps to move the teen’s case into adult court. He is accused of shooting his family members in the early morning hours of Oct. 21 inside the home on Lake Alice Road Southeast.

According to the charges, the boy killed the family and then staged the scene to make it appear as if his brother Benjamin had killed the family. The boy called 911, reporting his younger brother had just shot the entire family.

An 11-year-old girl survived being shot and escaped the house, before running to a neighbor’s house and calling 911 to report the 15-year-old boy had killed the family.

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A sheriff’s report said the 11-year-old girl saw her 15-year-old brother shoot her and then saw him touching the necks and chests of the other family members to “see if they were alive.” The girl later told detectives that the 15-year-old brother was the only one of the siblings who knew the combination to a gun safe in the home.

While the 15-year-old claimed his deceased brother had killed the family, then killed himself, investigators said the 13-year-old boy died from multiple gunshot wounds that were fired from farther than two feet away, according to the charges. One of the shots that killed the 13-year-old entered from the back of his head, according to an autopsy report which listed his manner of death as a homicide.

Defense attorneys, however, claim the 15-year-old boy’s version of events are "forensically viable."

“The State’s theory is that [15 year old] was involved in a mass killing of five people with firearms confined to a basement,” defense attorney Amy Parker wrote in a motion to preserve evidence. “There is no evidence at this point that we have received that indicates [15 year old] had any blood on him."

Parker’s motion was filed on Oct. 28 when there was a second visit to the home, and without the supervision of the sheriff’s office.

“It is my experience that law enforcement can and does engage in bias investigations when they think they have the ‘right’ suspect,” Parker wrote. “In my experience it is beneficial for defense to have an opportunity to investigate the crime scene in this case free from this bias.”

Prosecutors and an attorney for Sarah Humiston’s mother opposed the defense having access to the house in the first place.

“The defense has yet to make any showing as to why it is entitled to enter and search [Humiston family’s] property nor has the defense provided any rationale as to what they may hope to find that is material,” attorney Julie Kline wrote in a memo to Galvan on Oct. 28.

Kline argued the defense had sufficient access to the home on Oct. 23, when they were given access with the supervision of the sheriff’s office.

“There has been no factual predicate that makes it reasonably likely a second inspection of the residence will produce new information relevant to the defense, nor explanation as to why a second inspection would impact the confidence in the outcome of the trial,” Kline wrote.

Two days after the Oct. 29 search, Parker and co-counsel Molly Campera filed a notice to the court that they were withdrawing as counsel for the 15-year-old. His defense is now being handled by attorney Kristen Gestaut with the Obsidian Law Offices in Seattle.

A motions hearing for the case has been scheduled for Dec. 2. The decision on whether the teen’s case will stay in juvenile court is expected sometime in the summer of 2025.