ORIGINAL 5:18 PM UPDATE: Our partners at the Seattle Times are reporting that charges have been filed against two men in connection with the May 25th beating of a teenager in Highland Park. According to the Times report, they are the same two men questioned by police the morning the teenager was found beaten and bloodied, saying his attackers had made racist remarks (here’s our June report with the narrative from the police report); the report also says they are charged with robbery and malicious harassment, and that they are not in custody (which our check of the jail register confirms). We are looking up the court documents and will add more to the story when we get them.
7:05 PM UPDATE: One of the suspects is now booked into jail – 21-year-old Jonathan Baquiring was jailed less than an hour ago, according to the King County Jail Register.
7:27 PM UPDATE: Southwest Precinct Lt. Norm James is talking more about the case at the West Seattle Crime Prevention Council meeting, which we’re covering right now at the precinct. He says the Anti-Crime Team picked up Baquiring within an hour of getting word of the warrant, which seeks to have both (the other is 22-year-old Ahmed Y. Mohamed) held in lieu of half a million dollars bail each.
10:35 PM UPDATE: We now have downloaded the court documents. While most of the narrative is exactly the same as the original police report transcribed in our June report and linked above, this one contains, in the charging paperwork, the statement: “The only motivation for the defendants appears to have been money and the race of the victim” (the “malicious harassment” charge acknowledges the fact it’s an alleged hate crime). And there is information about the DNA evidence – read on:
As noted in the original narrative, an investigating officer swabbed dried blood from the hands of both suspects while questioning them near the scene the morning after the attack. The new court documents say an investigator also swabbed the victim’s cheek while meeting with him to review photo lineups on June 4th (at which time, the document says, the victim chose the photos of both of the men who are now charged).
The investigator writes that he submitted the victim’s cheek swabs to the Seattle Police Evidence Unit on June 10th, with a request for the Washington State Crime Lab to do a DNA test comparing it with the blood swabbed off the victims’ hands the morning after the attack. The report took almost three months, according to the court documents:
On 9/8/10 I received a report from the Washington State Crime Lab. The DNA exam was completed by (technician) … She concluded that the swabs taken from the suspects’ hands were swabs of human blood. She confirmed that the swab of blood removed from Jonathan Baquiring’s hands matched the blood profile of the victim … The estimated probability of selecting an unrelated individual at random from the US population with a matching profile is 1 in 2.4 quintillion. The swab of blood collected from the hand of Ahmed Mohamed is a mixture consistent with originating from two individuals. (The victim) is included as a potential contributor to this mixture. Based on the US population, it is estimated that 1 in 8.6 thousand people could be a contributor to this mixed profile.
We just checked again, and Mohamed is not yet on the jail roster. According to the court documents, he has one conviction on his record, carrying a concealed weapon; Baquiring is described as having “no known criminal record.”
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