No charges for Seattle officer who shot man on New Year’s Eve in 2018

Prosecutors say it is likely that Iosia Faletogo was trying to surrender to Seattle police when he was shot in the head following a foot chase and struggle with officers along Aurora Avenue on New Year’s Eve 2018.

However, a review of Faletogo’s death won’t result in criminal charges against the Seattle police officer who shot him. In a 53-page report, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office wrote that Officer Jared Keller is likely protected under a law that gives police leeway to make mistakes while reacting to stressful and fast-moving situations.

Prosecutors concluded Keller was legally justified when he fired, even if Faletogo had decided to give up.

Faletogo, 36, was in a car stopped by police on Aurora Avenue North in North Seattle at about 5 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in 2018. Faletogo ran from the vehicle and across the busy street, chased by six police officers, who tackled him and piled on. Graphic body-camera video showed Faletogo had a handgun at one point, which police later said was stolen.

The shooting of Faletogo sparked outrage and raised questions when body-camera video recorded Faletogo saying “Nope! Not reaching!” in response to officers’ repeated commands to “Stop reaching!” for a handgun he had dropped during the fight. Keller shot Faletogo a split-second after he uttered those words.

While it is possible that Faletogo intended to keep struggling despite his statements, Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Joseph Marchesano, a member of the office’s Public Integrity Division, wrote it was “more likely that Faletogo’s statement expressed his intent that he would no longer reach for the handgun … because he decided to stop resisting the officers’ attempt to arrest him.”

If that was the case, then Faletogo no longer posed a threat that would justify deadly force.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court has said an officer’s use of force must be measured and considered from the perspective of a reasonable officer in that moment, “rather than with 20/20 vision of hindsight.”

“The current incident illustrates that, as the United States Supreme Court stated, officers are forced to make split-second judgments under tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving circumstances,” Marchesano wrote.

He noted that 35 seconds elapsed between the moment Faletogo ran from officers in a convenience store parking lot and the gunshot. In that time, Keller and five other officers chased Faletogo across six lanes of Aurora Avenue traffic and wound up in a tangled scrum on a parking strip.

“Approximately fourteen hundredths of a second (0.14) elapsed between Faletogo’s statement that he was “not reaching” and (Keller’s) use of deadly force,” according to Marchesano’s analysis. “When the body worn video is played at real-time speed, Faletogo’s statement and the use of force appear to occur at nearly the same instant.”

The video shows Faletogo did not have the gun in his hand when the shot was fired.

An internal review of the shooting by the city’s Office of Police Accountability found Keller and the other officers were justified in their use of force and that their actions complied with department policy.

Mohammad Hamoudi, an attorney representing the Faletogo family at an upcoming inquest, said the county’s review of the shooting leaves out a significant point: the reason the officers stopped Faletogo in the first place.

Hamoudi said the evidence shows Faletogo was stopped on a pretext, in violation of state law preventing police from intentionally stopping people for minor infractions as part of a fishing expedition for more serious offenses.

According to a lawsuit filed against the city by Faletogo’s family, Keller and another officer, Garret Hay, started following his car near North 90th Street and Aurora Avenue North and began looking for a reason to stop him. One officer would later say Faletogo looked “shady,” according to pleadings.

The lawsuit accused the officers of targeting Faletogo because he was a large Pacific Islander man in a car with a Black woman in a predominantly white Seattle neighborhood.

Hamoudi also noted that Keller was one of seven officers involved in the shooting death of Kyle Gray and questioned whether he should have been on the streets. Keller has since left Seattle to work for the Spokane Police Department.

The family settled its lawsuit against the city in 2021 for $515,000, with most of the money placed in a trust for his children.

“This report leaves out everything that preceded the shooting and particularly why he was stopped,” Hamoudi said. “If they had not made that illegal stop, Iosia Faletogo would be alive today,”

Faletogo’s death was one of the oldest unreviewed police-involved homicides in King County as the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office attempts to work through a backlog created by delays in the county’s inquest system.