Authorities found five people shot to death in a home southeast of Seattle on Monday morning and arrested a teenager in connection with the killings, police said.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, the killings in Fall City, Washington, were the 25th mass murder in the US so far this year. The Impartial Archive defines a mass murder as a killing in which four or more victims are killed.
The case was also one of more than 425 mass shootings — in which four or more victims were killed or injured — in the U.S. so far this year, according to the archive.
An emailed statement Monday evening from King County Councilwoman Sarah Perry said the shooting involved a family of seven. Three of the people found dead Monday were young teenagers and two adults. A sixth person – described as a teenage girl – was injured, received first aid from a neighbor with medical experience and was hospitalized in “satisfactory” condition, investigators said, according to Washington state news outlet KIRO.
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A neighbor told local television news station KING that a couple and their five children lived in the house where the massacre took place.
Several people in Fall City called 911 around 5 a.m. to report the shooting, King County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Mike Mellis said during a media briefing Monday afternoon.
Arriving officers immediately took one teen into custody, while another injured teen was taken to a Seattle hospital, Mellis said. Both teens lived in the house, he said.
Officers who entered the home subsequently discovered the bodies of five people, Mellis said. Two were adults, and three were described by Mellis as young teenagers. No names have been released yet.
“As soon as the bodies were discovered, we clearly understand that this is a hugely important crime scene,” he said.
Mellis said there is no ongoing threat to the community.
“I have no reason to believe there will be any further arrests,” he said.
Mellis also said there is no history of calls for service at the home being made to local law enforcement.
The teen was booked into custody at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, according to Mellis. The teen will appear in court for an initial hearing on Tuesday or Wednesday, a spokesperson for the county prosecutor’s office said in an email.
A neighbor, Lynne Trowern, told KING: “I’m just in total shock, I keep bursting into tears.”
The local sheriff, Patricia Cole-Tindall, told KING she was “very sad and very disturbed” when she heard about the shooting.
The Fall City murders appear to broadly fit the definition of a type of crime known since the 1980s as family destruction. These cases often involve a person with a gun killing several close family members.
Communities in the US tend to interpret family destruction as isolated tragedies. But a 2023 Indianapolis Star investigation found that they occurred on average once every five days in the US.
The U.S. may not understand family destruction as well as it could because there is no centralized database for those types of crimes that provides insight into their characteristics or prevalence, as the Star investigation shows.
The annual high number of mass shootings and mass killings in the U.S. has prompted some in the country to call for more substantive federal gun control. But Congress is unable or unwilling to implement such measures.
The Associated Press contributed to the reporting
