We have more information tonight about the home-invasion suspect arrested by SWAT officers near Fauntleroy/Hudson on Wednesday. We’re identifying him because he’s being held on another case in which he’s charged, as well as this one in which charges are still pending. Total bail for 20-year-old Tyler L. Taylor is $700,000. A half-million of that is for the home-invasion robbery in which he’s accused, while most of the rest is for the case in which he’s charged. That case involves domestic-violence assault and unlawful gun possession, stemming from a January incident at his home in North Seattle, in which he allegedly threatened to pistol-whip family members. Though Taylor does not have a felony record, he was not supposed to have the gun under terms of a protection order against him. He was arrested after that incident; the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office wanted his bail set at $350,000, but the (unidentified) first-appearance judge set it at $75,000, and after a week, Taylor got out on bond.
According to probable-cause documents from his hearing today, that was almost two months after the home invasion for which he’s being held now. It happened in North Seattle on December 2nd; four men broke into a house and held a couple at gunpoint for more than an hour while stealing items including a car and forcing them to access their bank accounts online. (The narrative notes that the robbers at one point argued over how debit and credit cards work.) Taylor and other suspects were eventually found through use of the victims’ stolen cards at stores and ATMs from which security video was procured, plus cross-referenced cell phone records. The probable-cause documents also say Taylor used a stolen card to buy a $550 virtual-reality headset from a Best Buy store and linked his own account to the purchase.
None of the court documents in either case give any hints as to what Taylor was doing in West Seattle at the time of his arrest Wednesday, nor how police knew to find him there, but one document does say he threw a handgun over a fence before he was taken into custody. It was recovered, and found to have been illegally modified to automatic. Taylor was one of three suspects arrested yesterday; the other two arrests happened outside West Seattle. Potential charges Taylor faces in this case, according to prosecutors, are first-degree robbery, first-degree kidnapping, ID theft, motor-vehicle theft, and second-degree unlawful firearm possession.
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