The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, struggling under a backlog of murder cases and a glut of violent crime, has contracted with two prominent private Seattle attorneys to take over the prosecution of an Auburn police officer charged with murder in the 2019 shooting death of Jesse Sarey.
Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, who is retiring at the end of the month, said his office has brought in former prosecutors Patty Eakes and Angelo Calfo to prosecute Jeffrey Nelson, the first police officer charged with murder in King County in nearly 40 years.
Eakes has also been contracted by the state Attorney General’s Office to prosecute three Tacoma police officers charged in the 2020 suffocation death of Manny Ellis.
Satterberg said Friday that his office’s most experienced violent crime prosecutors are swamped with murder cases postponed when the courts shut down in the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as new cases stemming from a rash of shootings and other violent crimes. He said a case of the magnitude of the Nelson prosecution, which will serve as a precedent in the application of the state’s new police deadly-force statute, deserves attention his most experienced prosecutors just don’t have time to give.
“And it makes sense to have these same attorneys handling both of these significant prosecutions under this new statute,” Satterberg said of the Auburn and Tacoma police killings. “This is an important test of this law as these first two cases go forward.”
Eakes is an experienced former King County prosecutor and trial lawyer who was co-counsel on the prosecution of Green River serial killer Gary L. Ridgway, and Calfo served as a white-collar criminal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office before entering private practice. Both have had successful careers and often work as a team, forming their own boutique firm in Seattle. Calfo and Eakes unsuccessfully defended former Washington Auditor Troy Kelley on theft and fraud charges.
Their firm merged this summer with the international law of firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which has more than 2,000 attorneys in offices in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Satterberg said they will have access to “tremendous resources” to aid in the prosecution.
“This is another consequence of the pandemic,” Satterberg said, adding that the office will use federal COVID relief money to offset some of the costs of hiring outside counsel. The contract with the county, signed Thursday, provides an initial budget of $500,000. Eakes and Calfo will bill the county at a rate of $525 an hour.
Satterberg said his office is struggling with more than 250 pending murder prosecutions. He said all of his qualified senior deputies are wrangling more than 25 murder cases each, nearly double their usual caseload.
Satterberg said the Nelson prosecution is complex, with more than a dozen expert defense witnesses scheduled to testify, and will require the undivided attention of experienced lawyers.
He expects the Tacoma case will go to trial before Nelson and that Eakes and Calfo will be able to manage both cases.
“Even so, our office will remain intimately involved,” Satterberg said, adding that Eakes and Calfo have been deputized as special prosecuting attorneys and will be working with two career senior deputy prosecutors, Ian Ith and Jim Whisman, who have been involved in the Nelson case from its outset.
The announcement came during a routine status conference in the Nelson case, which has been postponed three times and was scheduled for trial in February. King County Superior Court Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps vacated that trial and said that, considering the time it will take the new attorneys to get up to speed, she doesn’t expect Nelson to go to trial before next fall, more than four years after Sarey was shot to death during a struggle with the officer.
Meanwhile, a Pierce County judge this week postponed the Ellis trial until September, which could conflict with the tentative Nelson schedule.
Phelps, the King County judge, did not rule on several pending motions, including a state request to allow the jury to hear about a long string of other arrests in which Nelson used force, including two other fatal shootings.
Elaine Simons, Sarey’s foster mother and a police accountability activist, told Phelps that the family was “suffering” due to the repeated delays.
Nelson killed Sarey on the evening of May 31, 2019, after responding to a disorderly conduct call in the 1400 block of Auburn Way North. He encountered Sarey, who had a history of mental health problems and had reportedly been throwing items at cars and kicking buildings. Nelson and Sarey got into a physical fight less than one minute after Nelson got out of his vehicle in an attempt to arrest Sarey on suspicion of misdemeanor disorderly conduct, according to charging documents.
Nelson tried to arrest Sarey by himself despite having called for backup, which was on the way, charging documents say.
Prosecutors concluded Nelson failed to follow training, escalated the situation unnecessarily and gave a written statement that was inconsistent with surveillance video, which shows him shooting Sarey once in the abdomen with a .45-caliber handgun that malfunctioned and jammed after the first shot.
Prosecutors say as Sarey slumped down the side of an ice machine, Nelson took several seconds to clear the jam and then shot Sarey a second time in the head.