A 2018 traffic stop ended with a horrific Seattle police killing deemed “lawful and proper.” Six years later a jury sees it differently.
On January 21st a six-member King County inquest jury concluded their unusually long four days of deliberations into the Seattle Police Department (SPD) killing of Iosia Faletogo on New Year’s Eve of 2018. Two of the jurors found that SPD officer Jared Keller’s use of deadly force was not legally justifiable and had caused Faletogo’s death by criminal means.
This marked the first time in history an inquest juror found that an SPD officer engaged in criminal conduct. The Faletogo inquest is only the second inquest in history where more than one juror found that any police officer working in King County had engaged in criminal conduct.
If not for the biases and confusion built into the King County inquest process (as detailed below) five of the six jurors may have found Falaetogo was killed by criminal means and/or that SPD policy or the actions of other officers led to an unnecessary death.
Except for two questions regarding possible criminal action, 87 of the 89 questions asked of jurors all relate to facts, policy, and training that are either not in dispute or are hard to dispute as, for example, with question 58 that asks “Did Officer Keller believe that Iosia Faletogo was attempting to reach for a firearm when Officer Keller decided to fire his weapon?“
It would be nearly impossible for a juror to answer “no” to a question like 58 since it asks what an officer believed. Jurors are given no leeway to make judgments about the propriety of the policy, training, law, or the subjective beliefs of officers (absent clear evidence that would contradict that belief).
The juror’s answers and their comments are available here.
While the Faletogo family was represented by lawyers at the inquest the family did not attend or otherwise participate in the inquest proceedings.
The restrictions and biases of the inquest process
Considering the built in restrictions and biases of the inquest process (as I detailed with the Charleena Lyles inquest in 2022) this jury’s findings are all the more surprising and significant. Whereas two jurors answered yes to criminal means, at least three, possibly all four, additional jurors saw serious failures in SPD policies and/or the actions of other officers that resulted in a preventable death.
The victim’s family gets one team of lawyers, almost always relying on the public defender or pro bono services. The City of Seattle and the SPD functionally get three teams of lawyers, all highly paid at taxpayers’ expense: a team for the City of Seattle/SPD, a second team for the officer(s) who used deadly force, and a third team for the inquest court itself.
While the lawyers for the inquest court are there to be objective and help elicit the facts the jury must consider, in actuality they serve as another opportunity to repeat and justify SPD’s policies and the officer’s perceptions of fear and threat. In the Faletogo inquest the three non-family teams of lawyers also served to establish as a supposed fact, and endlessly repeat, the highly questionable claim that Faletogo was reaching for his gun just before he was shot (discussed below).
The most notable bias in this inquest involved 10 of 12 witnesses (nine of whom were SPD officers), along with the inquest administrator (judge), referencing as fact that Faletogo was reaching for his gun when on the ground (as opposed to simply moving his hands around in an attempt to remain on his hands and knees). The only independent expert witness allowed by the inquest administrator claimed that Faletogo was reaching for the gun.
The contradicting testimony of an expert witness for the family, whose analysis was more objective, was denied by the inquest administrator.
At the start of the inquest, the administrator described to the jury Faletogo’s arm movements as reaching for the gun. The inquest attorneys asked every relevant witness about the reaching, without ever suggesting an alternative interpretation. All six officers testified that they either saw Faletogo reaching or believed he was reaching, therefore fearing for their lives.
In this video, from 3:12-3:31, you can see Faletogo’s arm movements are more likely an attempt to remain upright with two officers on his back – repositioning his hands as his upper body weight is being shifted by the officers – as opposed to intentionally reaching for the gun. This interpretation is further supported by the fact that his hands move closer and then further away from the gun. It also makes little sense that Faletogo would wait until he had two officers on his back, and was surrounded by four other officers, to fire his weapon when he had better opportunities to do so before being tackled.
The inquest process was never designed to deliberate on agency responsibility, justice, policy, morality, or what police could have done differently. The process was designed to determine if existing SPD policy and training were followed, regardless of how unreasonable or unjust. The inquest process only focuses on the officer or officers who are directly responsible for the use of deadly force and does not consider what responsibility other officers had. In their official notes (discussed in the next section), some jurors wished they could have held SPD policy and other officers responsible for what they viewed as an unnecessary killing.
In the inquest process it is nearly impossible for officers to be found not to be in compliance with their departments’ training and policy — just as happened with the Charleena Lyles inquest. In this inquest the jury was overwhelmed with the perceptions and testimony of six officers present at the killing of Faletogo. And, of course, Faletogo was not alive to testify as to his perceptions or the intent of his movements and actions.
Juror comments broadly condemn officers actions and SPD policy
The issues raised above present jurors with a dilemma: if an officer follows their department’s long established training and policy, how then can that officer be found to have engaged in unjustifiable force by criminal means? While it is neither logically or legally impossible to find such, there would be two unavoidable implications in such a finding:
- That a law enforcement agency has produced long standing policies and trainings that lead to criminal acts and
- That officers who must follow their departments’ trainings and policies are now to be held criminally liable for doing so.
We will see that this last implication resulted in at least two jurors feeling forced to answer no to criminal means, and that, in the absence of this implication, there might have been five votes affirming criminal means.
Questions 76, 77, 82, and 83 all concern the SPD use of force policy and training. All jurors believed that officer Keller, who fired the fatal shot, complied with SPD use of force policy and training except for question 77 where half the jurors answered yes and the other half answered “UNKNOWN.”
The jurors in the King County inquest process can optionally explain why they answered the inquest’s questions the way they did, with five of these six jurors doing so.
Juror 1, who clearly decided that Keller’s actions did not involve criminal means, stated that “Based on policies, training, Officer Keller is not liable for Mr. Faletogo’s death,” while noting that “The ‘system’ train [sic] & produces policies that gives officers no other option.” This juror also found that “Officer Hey [sp] may have instigated officer Keller to shoot & kill.“
The inquest process, focusing only on the officer who fired the deadly shots, does not allow a juror to render a verdict based on SPD policy and/or another officer’s actions resulting in an avoidable killing.
Similarly, Juror 4, who also clearly voted no to criminal means, wrote that “Unfortunately, due to SPD policies, he [officer Keller] really had no other options,” adding that “Morally, I believe SPD is the culprit of Mr. Faletogo’s death. At the time of the shooting, the gun was away from Mr. Faletogo, but officers continued to indicate to Officer Keller that deadly danger was imminent. This is an inquest into Mr. Faletogo’s death, not specifically Officer Keller, and the interrogatories should more critically examine all involved officers. Officer Hay, through his rapid, escalatory communication, should also have been evaluated” (emphasis added).
This indicates that a second juror finds that SPD policies and another officer’s actions led to an avoidable killing.
Juror 5, for whom it is difficult to discern how they voted on criminal means, stated “He [officer Hay] escalated whole incident from the beginning to the end. He assumed a lot of things during the incident. So his testimonies are not trustworthy.“
Finally, Juror 6, for whom it is also difficult to discern how they voted on criminal means, stated “The results of this shooting is a failure of every officer present not just Officer Keller, he was just the one that pulled the trigger. If rational and calm thought was used, rather than panic, Iosia Faletogo would still be alive” (emphasis added).
What is clear from the above answers by jurors is that at least five, possibly all six, jurors found that Faletogo’s killing was avoidable and caused by SPD policies, Officer Keller, and/or all six officers’ behaviors.
If jurors were explicitly instructed that they can find an officer criminally liable, despite finding that the officer followed SPD policy and training, it is likely there would have been four or five affirmative votes that officer Keller caused Faletogo’s death by criminal means.
What the jury was not allowed to know
The jury never got to hear anything regarding the past abuses and the complaint histories of the six officers involved in this incident. Between them, these six officers had an astounding 63 known complaints over the last few years. Five of the six officers involved each had eight or more complaints over less than seven years. Officer Keller, who killed Faletogo, had at least 15 known complaints in four years.
While not every complaint was upheld (not entirely surprising since complaint investigations are almost exclusively done by fellow SPD officers) these are extremely high numbers. They only reflect the complaints that Seattle Tech Bloc was able to uncover and may not be comprehensive.
Two of the six officers were working for the SPD in 2014 and both were part of the under 10% of SPD officers who sued to stop the federal consent decree for SPD oversight. One of the officers (Ryan Kennard) was involved in the outrageous 2021 arrest and jailing of protesters using sidewalk chalk.
Officer Audi Acuesta was part of the stake-out that led to the SPD killing of Che Taylor and was also part of the “Proud Boy ruse” in 2020. Officers Keller and Hay were also involved in shooting to death Kyle Gray in 2017.
If the jury had any of this knowledge, it may have placed self-serving officer testimony and the officers’ failure to remove Faletogo’s gun in a very different light. It also would have raised greater suspicion as to the real intent of the traffic stop (discussed below) that led to the killing.
The Incident
At around 5pm on New Year’s Eve of 2018 Iosia Faletogo was driving his step-mom’s car north on Aurora Avenue N from N 90th Street with little traffic around.
Minutes before Faletogo was stopped he came to the attention of officers Jared Keller and Garret Hay. Why that car came to their attention is still debated over six years later and remains unresolved since their in-car video was never recovered due to a never-explained technical malfunction.
Keller and Hay stopped Faletogo for what they referred to as an “unsafe lane change,” reiterating in their inquest testimony that Faletogo turned right across two lanes. Their Office of Police Accountability (OPA) investigation statement alleges that Faletogo’s car made “an illegal lane change. Specifically, the car moved right from the left lane, across traffic, and into the parking lot of a convenience store.”
There are no state or city laws that make crossing multiple lanes of traffic (except at an intersection, which this was not) illegal, except when one does so failing to signal or interrupting/endangering other cars, neither of which happened here according to private surveillance video and testimony presented at the inquest. Absent in-car video, and the repeated failure by the officers to explain at inquest what made them first notice Faletogo’s car, it appears very likely this was a pretextual traffic stop driven by bias, i.e., the officers seeing a 295-pound, 6-foot-4-inch Samoan man. Despite these facts, the inquest administrator forbade any discussion or evidence concerning pretextual stops.
In the video, about 14 seconds after Faletogo runs, he is tackled by Keller and a gun drops to the pavement from Faletogo’s pants. Within a very few seconds four additional SPD officers join Keller and Hay. After 23-24 seconds of Keller and Hay struggling with Faletogo, as they are surrounded by four other officers, Officer Keller fires one hollow-point round from his service weapon pressed behind Faletogo’s left ear.
Keller’s calculated shot was intended to be immediately lethal, as admitted by Keller and other SPD officers during inquest testimony (using euphemisms like “ending the threat”). Keller also admitted that he tried to fire his gun multiple times before the eventual shot that killed Faletogo, but that his gun jammed on the earlier tries.
As Juror 2 noted “As Keller’s gun was out of battery [jammed], this would be the time to assess. Mr. Faletogo had hands in front of him, on the ground. The gun was at his feet, and Mr. Faletogo said ‘I’m not reaching.’ Based on this, I do not believe lethal force was necessary at that moment.“
The video raises many questions, most notably was Faletogo ever holding the gun in a manner where he could have fired it and why couldn’t six trained Seattle police officers separate Faletogo from the gun without killing him. As Juror 6 said, as noted above, “The results of this shooting is a failure of every officer present… If rational and calm thought was used, rather than panic, Iosia Faletogo would still be alive.“
All aspects of our current police accountability system were incapable of answering these questions in a remotely objective manner, instead determining, rubber-stamping, or simply accepting that Faletogo’s killing by the SPD was “lawful and proper.” Somehow, at least five of six random King County jurors saw it very differently, highlighting the failures of our current police accountability system. Clearly accountability must go further or similar preventable deaths at the hands of police will continue to occur, as they have in many other past cases and as happened just recently.
