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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Man calls from New York state to confess part in killing Seattle teen

A second man, killed in October, is also implicated

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SEATTLE — A former Seattle man now living on the East Coast phoned a Seattle police homicide detective in February with an out-of-the-blue confession to involvement in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Robert Robinson Jr. in March 2015, according to a search-warrant affidavit filed in the case.

The 23-year-old caller — who told the detective the killing of the high school senior was “eating me alive” — also implicated a 24-year-old man who was killed in an unrelated shooting in West Seattle in October, says the warrant.

The affidavit for the search warrant, written in February by homicide Detective Frank Clark and filed last week in King County Superior Court, seeks cellphone records for the two suspects in the days before and after Robinson was killed on Beacon Hill.

The phone records will be used to plot GPS locations, identify potential witnesses, determine any phone contact between the two, and help investigators “confirm or refute” whether the men are indeed responsible for killing Robinson, the warrant says.

However, Clark wrote the possible suspect “has provided information consistent with this crime that was not available to the general public,” including the caliber and type of firearm used in the shooting.

The Seattle Times does not typically identify criminal suspects until they have been formally charged. The 23-year-old, who moved to New York state in June, has not been arrested in connection with Robinson’s death, according to jail records in Seattle and in New York.

The 24-year-old was fatally shot last fall, apparently as a result of an ongoing dispute over a $200 drug debt.

Robinson was walking north on 15th Avenue South at South Forest Street when he was shot once in the chest just before 4 p.m. on March 15, 2015, Seattle police reported at the time. Witnesses said they heard gunfire and saw a blue Honda speeding away.

He died at Harborview Medical Center.

Robinson was remembered as a thoughtful, funny and well-liked young man who was mourned by a large circle of friends.

Aside from the vehicle description, it did not appear police had much information to go on.

Then in February, the now-23-year-old man contacted Clark, who with another detective conducted a phone interview before traveling to New York to interview him in person, the affidavit says.

According to the affidavit, the 23-year-old provided the following account:

The two men met Robinson on Beacon Hill on March 13, and the three went to the 23-year-old’s West Seattle apartment. At one point, Robinson went to use the bathroom and the 23-year-old rifled through the teen’s backpack; he said he intended to rob Robinson but was caught in the act.

Robinson was initially angry but calmed down and the three men “decided to drink some alcoholic beverage,” the warrant says.

The 23-year-old “said he became ill after drinking the alcohol and thought Robinson put something in his drink,” it says.

Two days later, the two men drove to Beacon Hill to look for Robinson “so they could shoot him … in retaliation for Robinson ‘poisoning’ ” the 23-year-old, the warrant says.

After shooting Robinson, the two men drove to Alki Beach, where the 23-year-old threw the gun in the water, he said.

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According to the warrant, detectives confirmed the 24-year-old’s brother is the registered owner of a light blue 1993 Honda Civic coupe, a vehicle consistent with witness descriptions of the car seen fleeing the shooting scene.

After the fatal shooting, the men’s friendship dissolved, the warrant says. It is not clear whether the 23-year-old knew in February that his friend had been killed four months earlier.

The 23-year-old told detectives his friend had been the one to shoot Robinson, the warrant says. But when detectives confronted him “with some information that led investigators to believe” the 23-year-old may have been the shooter, he changed his story but then quickly recanted, it says.

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