Defense team accused of altering the crime scene of Fall City family murders

KING COUNTY, Wash. – Prosecutors allege a team of public defenders violated a court order when they gained unsupervised access to the home where a Fall City family was murdered last month.

In a motion filed Nov. 5, the King County Prosecutor’s Office alleged that there is photographic evidence showing that items from the home were altered or removed while attorneys for the 15-year-old boy accused of the murders were inside .

The boy is accused of killing his parents, Mark and Sarah Humiston, and his younger siblings; Benjamin, 13, Joshua, 9, and 7-year-old Katheryn. A judge previously ordered the media not to publicly name the suspect.

“It is clear that the defense and their agents exceeded the authorized scope of their search ordered by the Court,” Senior Deputy Prosecutor Jason Brookhyser wrote in the motion.

The boy’s attorneys were granted access to the home on Oct. 29, a day after Judge Veronica Galvan granted their request to enter the home without supervision from the sheriff’s office.

Galvan gave four members of the defense team 10 hours to take photos and perform a 3D scan of the house, and to search the boy’s bedroom. The order prohibited the attorneys from removing items from the home or searching through “filing cabinets, containers, drawers, digital devices and the like.”

“The defense team may only view items that are clearly visible,” Galvan wrote in the order.

The King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) documented the home before and after the defense team’s entry, according to the prosecutor’s memo.

The memo claims a bottle of Clorox wipes is missing from the home and that the minor victims’ backpacks have been opened or moved. The prosecution is seeking an order to compel the defense to hand over all material collected or documented during their stay in the house.

“The state is particularly interested in the materials obtained on October 29, as the KCSO was not permitted to observe the defense or their officers while they spent hours in the residence, and a comparison of the photographs taken in the front entrance of the residence, as well as the boys’ and girls’ rooms before and after their presence show that they exceeded the scope of the certification and motion to compel discovery authorized by the Court’s order,” Brookhyser wrote. “The State is entitled to possess those materials for the appropriate counsel’s mutual discovery obligations, and the Court should also have access to those materials to properly determine whether the counsel met the presumption that they would be acting as ‘officers of the court’ if they were given uncontrolled access to the scene.”

Prosecutors have taken steps to move the teen’s case to adult court. He is accused of shooting his family members in the early morning hours of Oct. 21 at the home on Lake Alice Road Southeast.

According to the indictment, the boy murdered the family and then staged the scene to make it appear as if his brother Benjamin had murdered the family. The boy called 911 and reported that his younger brother had just shot the entire family.

An 11-year-old girl survived the shooting and escaped the house, before running to a neighbor’s house and calling 911 to report that the 15-year-old boy had killed the family.

According to a sheriff’s report, the 11-year-old girl saw her 15-year-old brother shoot her and then saw him touch the necks and chests of the other family members to “see if they were still alive.” The girl later told investigators that the 15-year-old brother was the only one of the siblings who knew the combination to a gun safe in the house.

While the 15-year-old claimed his late brother killed the family and then committed suicide, investigators said the 13-year-old boy died from multiple gunshot wounds fired from more than two feet away, according to the allegations. One of the shots that killed the 13-year-old came from the back of his head, according to an autopsy report that ruled his manner of death a homicide.

However, defense lawyers argue that the 15-year-old boy’s version of events is “forensically viable.”

“The state’s theory is that (15-year-old) was involved in a mass murder of five people locked in a basement with firearms,” attorney Amy Parker wrote in a motion to secure evidence. “There is no evidence that we have received at this time that the 15-year-old boy had blood on him.”

Parker’s motion was filed on Oct. 28 when a second visit to the home took place, and without supervision from the sheriff’s office.

“It has been my experience that law enforcement can engage in biased investigations when they believe they have the ‘right’ suspect,” Parker wrote. “In my experience, it is beneficial to the defense to have the opportunity to examine the crime scene in this case free of these biases.”

Prosecutors and an attorney for Sarah Humiston’s mother initially opposed allowing the defense access to the home.

“The defense has yet to demonstrate why it has a right to enter and search the Humiston family property, nor has the defense provided any reasoning as to what they hope to find is material,” attorney Julie Kline wrote in a statement declaration. memo to Galvan on October 28.

Kline argued that the defense had sufficient access to the home on Oct. 23, when they gained access under the supervision of the sheriff’s office.

“There is no factual basis that makes it reasonably likely that a second inspection of the home will yield new information relevant to the defense, nor an explanation as to why a second inspection would undermine confidence in the outcome of the trial,” Kline wrote.

Two days after the Oct. 29 search, Parker and co-counsel Molly Campera filed a notice with the court that they were withdrawing as counsel for the 15-year-old. His defense is now being handled by attorney Kristen Gestaut at Obsidian Law Offices in Seattle.

A hearing on the case is scheduled for December 2. A decision on whether the teen’s case will remain in juvenile court is expected sometime in the summer of 2025.