Charges offer look at how prolific King County graffiti taggers operate

SEATTLE — King County prosecutors have filed more than 30 criminal cases against 16 graffiti taggers who together have allegedly caused upward of $100,000 in property damage, scrawling their names in spray paint and defacing billboards, murals and walls in the dead of night.

Thirty cases — mostly for first- and second-degree malicious mischief — were filed Wednesday while four others were filed in September. A couple of the defendants also face second-degree burglary charges, accused of cutting fences or locks to access a Sound Transit yard in Seattle and a water tower in Kent, according to charging papers.

Prosecutor Leesa Manion said the goal in filing the charges isn’t to lock up taggers but to make them pay restitution. She noted the city of Seattle spends nearly $6 million a year on graffiti removal and the state Department of Transportation has spent $1.4 million to remove graffiti from freeway walls, overpasses and signs in the past two years.

“We are seeking accountability for what amounts to felony-level behavior,” Manion said during a Thursday news conference in a fourth-floor conference room at the King County Courthouse in downtown Seattle. “It is not the jail time or incarceration that we think will make a difference. It is getting folks to pay for the damage they have caused.

“Many small businesses are struggling to keep the lights on and they are impacted by someone else’s vandalism and the defacing, over and over again, of their storefronts and their property,” she said.

Deputy prosecutors along with members of the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriff’s Office, the Washington State Patrol, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office and the mayor’s office have been collaborating for more than a year with additional investigations into infamous tagging crews underway.

Fourteen of the 16 people charged in the cases announced Thursday belong to or are associated with two prolific crews, MSP and BTM, acronyms for “Making Suckas Panic” and “Big Time Mobb,” respectively. One defendant, Michael Matugas, 35, of Seattle, appears to claim WAI, a tagger crew that originated in Compton, Calif., in the early 1990s and has several meanings attached to its acronym, including “We Always Inhale.” Another defendant, Andrew Vaughn, 23, of Bellevue, isn’t associated with any known crews but his tag — DOTCOM — is well known up and down the Interstate 5 corridor, charging papers say.

Most of the graffiti vandalism in the Seattle area “is done for personal fame and glory,” Seattle police Detective Robert Belshay said as the news conference at the courthouse was winding down. “The more times your name is up, the more notoriety they receive.”

Some taggers travel vast distances to get their tags up, along with those of their crew. Spray paint and paint markers are typically used for simple tags on light poles, newspaper boxes and other surfaces, but more elaborate, large-scale tags are painted on with rollers, often in multiple colors. Most of the paint is stolen from home improvement stores, according to Senior Deputy Prosecutor Gary Ernsdorff.

“It’s basically a form of organized crime,” said Belshay, who has been leading the Seattle investigations since mid-2023. Many of the charged taggers were identified from photos and videos they posted to social media sites, and once identified they could be linked to various sites because they put their names on the crime scenes, he said.

The Seattle police investigation into MSP really started with the on-view arrest of Cameron Scott O’Neil, a 28-year-old Federal Way man who was caught by a patrol officer while spray painting a 6-foot-tall by 34-foot-long tag on an offramp wall from the Ballard Bridge in July 2021, charging papers say. At the time, he wasn’t booked into jail because of the COVID-19 booking restrictions in place at the time.

“That 2021 case kicked the majority of this off,” said Belshay, who received the case against O’Neil last year.

But charging documents show the real coup seemingly came about after the September arrest of Kyle McLaughlin, a 40-year-old tattoo artist from Tacoma, who was pulled over on Interstate 90 by state troopers in Grant County. Troopers seized his phone and turned it over to Seattle police, providing detectives with a treasure trove of evidence, both of McLaughlin’s own activities and the identities of other members of MSP, according to the charges.

For instance, photos and metadata from McLaughlin’s phone tied him and Joseph Johnson, who also went by Joseph Gutierrez, to the defacing of a water tower in Kent in January 2023 with their tags, WESH and GRIDE.

After Johnson, 30, died in April from a fentanyl overdose, “tribute and memorial tags to GRIDE and GRIDE tags and murals began showing up in the Tacoma and Seattle areas,” according to charges filed against Nicholas Kuehlwen, 30, of Tacoma. Kuehlwen, who uses the moniker KEANS and is known as “The Governor,” is the alleged leader of MSP.

One such tribute to Johnson — GRIDE’S WORLD! — was painted on a wall along Interstate 5 beneath the Yesler Way overpass. Joe Romero Zapien, 28, of Tacoma was charged with second-degree malicious mischief along with Kuehlwen, McLaughlin and O’Neil for that particular tag, according to charging documents.

MSP taggers alone have caused more than $500,000 in damage in the Seattle and Tacoma areas, the charges say, and McLaughlin’s videos show him and other taggers — including Kuehlwen — “committing acts of vandalism” locally and in California, Colorado, Missouri and other locations.

Mitchell Ellero-Brooks, a 23-year-old from Federal Way, was charged with McLaughlin for a March break-in at a Sound Transit lot on Airport Way South, charging papers say. The incident, in which light rail trains were tagged, represented an escalation in behavior since Ellero-Brooks had previously only filmed McLaughlin — but in this case, he scouted the location, planned the break-in and placed his own tags on trains, according to charging papers.

Nine members or apparent associates of BTM have also been charged by prosecutors. They are:

• Sophia Claire Tye-Rosenstiel, 28, of Seattle.
• Casey Cain, 38, of Seattle (court records show Cain suffered a traumatic brain injury in a skateboarding accident earlier this year and he is no longer capable of making financial or medical decisions for himself).
• Campbell Henry Long, 26, of Seattle.
• Celeste Elise Louden, 24, of Seattle.
• Montrell Shawn Clifton, 38, of Seattle.
• Jose Betancourth, 39, of Yakima.
• Simon Aristides, 18, of Seattle.
• Dylan Blue, 18, of Seattle.
• Aaron Lind, 37, of Bellingham.

While bail has been requested for a handful of the 16 defendants, most will be issued summons to appear in court, according to prosecutors.