SEATTLE — Two Seattle Police officers were justified when they shot and killed Charleena Lyles and had no other reasonable alternative when they pulled the trigger, according to a unanimous King County Coroner’s jury after a two-week inquest into her 2017 death.
The decision was met with an angry outburst by Lyles’ father, who hollered “[Expletive] you! [Expletive] you! You killed my daughter!” as he was expelled from the courtroom by inquest administrator Michael Spearman, who apologized to the six-member jury.
The two police officers, Jason Anderson and Steven McNew, left the inquest by a back door and through a loading dock as Lyles’ angry family members crowded the hallway outside.
The jury responded to 123 questions and not all responses were unanimous, and all agreed that Anderson failed to follow SPD policy stating that he was supposed to be carrying a Taser that day.
However, the jury also unanimously found that use of a Taser in the closed confines of her apartment, as she advanced on the officers with a knife, would not have been appropriate or effective.
Lyles, a pregnant, 30-year-old Black mother of four with a history of mental illness, had called police the morning of July 18, 2017 to report a burglary, although evidence at the inquest would show no burglary had occurred and surveillance video showed she had never left her apartment.
Officer Jason Anderson, who had been a Seattle officer for about two years, was dispatched, and when he arrived at the Brettler Family Place Apartments near Magnuson Park, where Lyles and her children lived in a fourth-floor unit, he made a routine computer check that showed Lyles was well known to police and had an “officer safety warning” attached to her name.
The warning said that two weeks earlier during a domestic violence call Lyles had cornered an officer in her apartment with a large pair of shears. She had said she was going to “morph into a wolf” and talked about cloning her daughter. That incident ended peacefully, with Lyles taken into custody.
Anderson, per Seattle police procedures, asked for a backup on that July day officer even though a “cold burglary” was usually a one-officer response. Officer Steven McNew, a 17-year veteran, responded. As the pair walked to the apartment, it was decided that McNew would be the “cover” officer, an observer there for security, and that Anderson would take the report. Their only discussion about how to handle the call was to “not let her get behind us,” according to an audio recording of the incident captured by microphones synched to Anderson’s police cruiser’s dash camera.
The officers went into the apartment and for the first several minutes, the call was routine. Lyles said what had been taken, and Anderson asked questions. Children could be heard in the background. Then, about four minutes into the call, Lyles’ demeanor changed, according to the officer’s testimony and the audio.
Anderson said he looked up from his notepad and saw Lyles lunging at him with a small knife. He said he jumped back and had to suck in his stomach to avoid being stabbed. McNew said he drew his Glock service handgun. Both officers can be heard yelling “Get Back! Get Back!” while Lyles yelled obscenities and yelled “Do it!” McNew was in the apartment’s small kitchen, with nowhere to go. Anderson recalled being backed up against a door, although video would later show him retreating into the hallway through the apartment’s open door as the shots where fired.
Both officers said they had no choice to but shoot Lyles, claiming she represented a deadly threat that could not have been neutralized any other way, even though McNew called “Taser!” at one point and evidence showed the device could have been effective. Anderson was supposed to be carrying one, but had left it in his locker that day because it’s battery was dead. He was later disciplined for that failure.
The family last year settled a civil lawsuit against the officers and the Seattle Police Department for $3.5 million.
Both officers also had batons and pepper spray, but said they would not have been effective at stopping the 5-foot-3, 110-pound Lyles and that their use would have put them too close to Lyles and endangered their lives.
Both officers fired almost simultaneously, striking Lyles seven times, with three of the rounds hitting her from behind. The medical examiner said two of the wounds would have been almost immediately fatal — one ripping through her superior vena cava, the large vein that returns the body’s blood to the heart, and another in her stomach that tore the deep femoral. Another bullet struck her in the uterus; she was 15 weeks’ pregnant.
In King County, an inquest jury is convened for every death caused by law enforcement. The process is a public inquiry designed to explore the facts around Lyles’ death, whether police followed proper procedures and if “criminality” was involved.
SPD has cleared the officers of wrongdoing. Both remain with the department.
The six-member inquest jury — down from its original eight members because of a COVID outbreak that also infected two of the attorneys — heard six days of testimony, 19 witnesses and considered 56 exhibits, including the audio of the shooting, photographs of Lyles dead in the hallway of her apartment and autopsy photos of her wounds.
The inquest was punctuated with tense moments, including an incident that drew condemnation from her family and a warning from inquest administrator Michael Spearman. SPD sent members of its SWAT team to the Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center after McNew walked through a group of Lyles’ family members outside, drawing taunts and obscenities.
Both officers offered emotional testimony, with McNew recalling the Lyles children in the moments after the shooting: how he picked up a toddler who had crawled over to his mother’s body and laid on her chest, and a second child, a boy, coming out of a bedroom to say, “You shot my mom.”
Both officers faced a blistering examination by the Lyles family attorney, Karen Koehler, who relentlessly attacked their narrative that they had no way of knowing Lyles might turn on them — despite her history of mental illness and the previous incident just 13 days earlier — or that they had no alternative to the use of deadly force, either through the use of less-lethal tools or their claimed inability to retreat from the apartment or de-escalate the situation.
The inquest into Lyles’ death was postponed for years because of revisions to the coroner’s inquest process — which is unique to King County — and police legal challenges to those changes, culminating in a unanimous Washington Supreme Court opinion that reinstated an expanded inquest process and recognized that its previous incarnation had been biased toward police and detrimental to the families of the victims of police violence.
Before 2017, no police officer in King County had been charged for a death in 30 years. Those inequities were evident in 2017, when Lyles’ death was one of a grim string of 11 police shootings, several involving young Black people. That year also hosted a pair of questionable inquests into two of those deaths — Des Moines teen Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens and Kent’s Giovonn Joseph-McDade — which led tled King County Executive Dow Constantine to halt inquests and impanel a task force to review and suggest changes to the system.
There are at least 56 inquests pending in King County, all but a handful involving police shootings. The others involve deaths in correctional facilities.
The next inquest, scheduled to start Aug. 22, involves the Oct. 30, 2017 shooting death of Robert Lightfeather by Federal Way police.
