Man stalked, shot 2 homeless women in Kent, prosecutors say

Custom tire decals helped Kent police identify a 36-year-old man accused of shooting two homeless women after one or both of them rebuffed his sexual advances, according to prosecutors.

James-David Joseph Algarin was arrested Thursday at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where he’d gone to pick up friends, and charged Friday with two counts of attempted first-degree murder for shooting the women last April, charging papers say. Algarin remains jailed in lieu of $1.5 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned May 4.

Though police identified Algarin as a suspect and seized his car and cellphone as evidence last year, the investigation was hampered because detectives didn’t have software to defeat the phone’s passcode, charging papers say. New software has since led to the discovery of “a trove of evidence” from his phone, including GPS tracking, text messages, internet searches and other location data, the charges say.

Algarin “stalked homeless women around Kent at night for the purpose of propositioning them for sex then shooting them,” Senior Deputy Prosecutor Stephen Herschkowitz wrote in charging papers. He noted surveillance footage also shows Algarin driving around to areas in Kent where people living homeless are known to congregate.

Algarin lived in Kent at the time of the shootings but had since moved to Tacoma, the charges say. He shot the first woman with a handgun, briefly returned to his apartment, then shot the second woman with an AR-15 rifle, according to prosecutors.

Kent police were called to a park-and-ride lot in the 900 block of West James Street at 11:01 p.m. on April 14, 2022, and witnesses directed officers to a woman who had been shot in the back, according to the charges. The witnesses reported hearing a gunshot and seeing a light consistent with a muzzle flash before a red car with white decals on the rear window left the parking lot, then returned a short time later, followed by a second gunshot, say the charges.

The woman, who was taken to Harborview Medical Center, later told detectives a man picked her up at a 7-Eleven convenience store on Central Avenue South — a statement corroborated by video-surveillance footage. The man exposed himself and asked for sex, then became angry when she turned him down, the charges say. She got out of his car at the park-and-ride, where she took only a few steps before she was shot. The woman crawled into some bushes to hide and heard a second shot but wasn’t struck, say the charges.

Thirty-six minutes after the first shooting, a man called 911 and reported that he had come across a woman who had been shot in 200 block of East Saar Street, which is roughly two blocks from the 7-Eleven, according to the charges.

Officers found the woman lying in the street with gunshot wounds to the back of her head, leg and buttocks, the charges say. They located six spent .223 caliber cartridge casings nearby.

“The damage of the head shot alone was so devastating that it will permanently affect (the woman’s) quality of life forever,” a detective wrote in charging papers.

Police didn’t initially know whether the two shootings were related. While there was no video footage of the first shooting, the second was caught on camera, say the charges.

A detective spotted a bright red Subaru WRX in the footage that was consistent with the vehicle description provided by witnesses at the first shooting scene and noted the car had decals on its windows and tires. Police contacted two online retailers that sell custom tire lettering kits, and one of them confirmed Algarin had placed an order that was mailed to his Kent address, the charges say.

Police confirmed Algarin owns a red Subaru WRX and later learned he had been stopped by a State Patrol trooper in 2019 for driving without a front license plate, according to the charges. The trooper arrested him for violating a no-contact order, which prevents him from legally owning firearms, charging papers say. Footage from the traffic stop showed three window decals that matched those seen in the shooting footage.

Four days after the shootings, a detective found the Subaru in the parking lot of the same apartment building where the tire lettering kit had been mailed, but by then, the decals and most of the lettering had been removed from the car, though most of the adhesive could still be seen, charging papers say. Investigators later dusted fingerprint powder onto the adhesive, and clear images of the removed decals matched those in the video footage and photos posted to Algarin’s social media accounts, say the charges.

During a search of Algarin’s apartment, police found firearm accessories but no guns, though they did find a Southwest Airlines firearms declaration tag for a flight from Denver to Seattle in late 2021, the charges say. Detectives contacted a Colorado Springs woman who had briefly dated Algarin and learned the two had gone to a gun show together, where she bought a shotgun, a pistol and an AR-15 rifle at his request and was reimbursed with a mobile payment app, say the charges.

Earlier this month, detectives were finally able to analyze Algarin’s phone, and location data corroborated his movements on the night of the shootings, the charges say. Detectives also found text messages between Algarin and a friend sent before and between the shootings: “Time for a murder,” he texted just before 7 p.m., then “Watch my dogs if I don’t come back. Just kick the door down,” at 11:12 p.m., according to the charges.

“Less homeless ppl [people],” he texted at 11:20 p.m., the charges say.