A 13-Year-Old Is Charged With Killing His 17-Year-Old Cousin. The Truth Took Days to Surface.
Favour Bitrus
June 10, 2026
What Seattle police were first told was a self-inflicted shooting. What investigators ultimately concluded was something else entirely, a story that unravelled slowly over several days, piece by piece, until a 13-year-old boy’s own mother went to the police and told them what her son had confessed to her at the bedside of his dying cousin.
The shooting happened on the night of 29 May at the Willow Crossing Apartments on Martin Luther King Jr. Way South in South Seattle. A 911 caller reported that a friend had been “playing with his gun and shot himself” inside the apartment. Officers arrived to find a 17-year-old boy on the floor of a bedroom with a gunshot wound to the head, a Smith and Wesson .45-caliber handgun nearby, and a spent cartridge casing on the floor. Three teenagers who had been in an adjoining room told police they heard the shot and found the victim’s body blocking the door when they tried to reach him. They called 911. The victim was taken to Harborview Medical Center, where he died two days later.
For the first two days, the case appeared to be what the initial 911 call described. Then, on 31 May, the 13-year-old’s mother called Seattle police from Harborview. According to court documents, she told investigators her son had admitted to her that the shooting was accidental. He had been handling the gun, manipulating the slide, when it fired. The story he had given her initially, that his cousin had shot himself, was not true. After the gun went off, he had run from the apartment without calling for help or alerting anyone to what had happened.
The medical examiner’s office conducted an autopsy on 3 June. The findings were inconsistent with a self-inflicted wound. The location of the gunshot, the trajectory of the bullet, and the absence of stippling, the tissue damage typically left by a close-range discharge against skin, all pointed away from suicide and toward homicide. The manner of death was ruled consistent with homicide.
Apartment security footage deepened the case against the younger boy. Cameras reportedly captured him arriving at the complex with his cousin shortly before the shooting. Minutes after the shot was fired, he was seen running from a stairwell connected to the apartment, leaving the area with his hood pulled up and a mask covering his face.
On 3 June, after investigators encouraged his parents to bring him in, the 13-year-old surrendered to police. On 9 June, prosecutors charged him in King County Juvenile Court with first-degree manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm. He is accused of recklessly causing his cousin’s death while handling a gun he had no legal right to possess.
The case raises questions that the charges alone cannot answer, about where the gun came from, how a 13-year-old had access to it, and what was happening in that apartment in the moments before a teenager died on the floor of a bedroom while his friends sat unaware in the next room.
