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Shooter may have missed his target, police speculate
Saturday, November 6, 1999
By KIMBERLY A.C. WILSON
Updated 8:00 p.m.
The shipyard gunman never saw the face of the man seated in the swivel chair. He pulled out a pistol and fired five quick shots. Peter John Giles died in an instant.
The shooter pivoted to his left and fired twice through the corner of a tall metal filing cabinet. The force threw Russell Brisendine into a window, where the mortally wounded electrician sagged over the frame.
Then, the gunman pointed his weapon toward the far corner of the small office, where a fisherman leaned back in a chair. A bullet hit the 58-year-old man in the torso. He feigned death, falling to his face on the gritty tile floor.
A second later, as if an afterthought, the gunman fired a final round at the 19-year-old clerk seated just to his right. The bullet shattered the man's arm.
The gunman vanished 15 seconds later.
Friday, for the first time since Wednesday's shooting, detectives described in detail how the incident unfolded. They based their account on interviews and forensic evidence taken from the crime scene, including powder burns and dropped shell casings.
And they revealed that the elusive shooter may have missed his intended target: The man, they said, may have been gunning for the person who usually sat at in the swivel chair centered in the tiny bookkeeping office of Northlake Shipyards.
As the search for the gunman enters its fourth day, police plan to interview Giles' uncles, Peter and Richard Kelly Jr., who own the shipyard.
The brothers were vacationing at the time of the shootings. Although police have talked to them over the telephone, they will interview them more extensively on their return home, Officer Carmen Best said.
Did the gunman mean to kill one of the owners, who usually occupied the center desk where Giles was sitting?
"It's a theory we're checking out," homicide Detective Dick Gagnon said.
Just before 10:30 Wednesday morning, the gunman strode through the front door of the Northlake Shipyard building at 1441 N. Northlake Way.
He passed several offices on his way to a tiny bookkeeping office.
Two steps inside, he stopped and aimed a 9mm semiautomatic handgun toward the back of a big swivel chair about 5 feet ahead of him.
Giles, 27, sat in the chair, talking.
The gunman fired nine shots in all. Giles and Brisendine, 43, were killed, and two others wounded.
Moments after the killing began, the shipyard shooter placidly retraced his steps down the labyrinthine hallway to the main entrance of the two-story building and disappeared.
"I bet you this whole thing took 15 seconds," said Gagnon, one of two veteran investigators heading the manhunt for the killer.
In the meantime, investigators are continuing to wade through hundreds of tips and more than a dozen eyewitness accounts of the shooting. As of last night, police had interviewed and cleared a handful of "persons of interest" during their search for the killer.
In the meantime, investigators are continuing to wade through hundreds of tips. As of last night, police had interviewed and cleared a handful of "persons of interest" during their search for the killer.
The leads have been daunting, said Ed Joiner, assistant chief of operations, as have media requests for information.
"Because of the national interest that this is getting, we're getting just deluged by calls, and quite frankly it is having an impact on the ability of the detectives to follow up people and get the work done," Joiner said at an afternoon news conference.
During the news conference, Joiner defended the Police Department from "rumors" about how it handled the shooting incident in the crucial hours before the manhunt trail cooled.
"Based on the information that I'm aware of, I think the response to the scene was outstanding," Joiner said. "We had 14 officers from the first watch that were on the scene in a matter of minutes.
"We had traffic units respond, we had SPU, Guardian One was in the air in a very short period of time. So we had an awful lot of officers flood that area very quickly. By early that afternoon, we had somewhere between 90 and 100 officers in the area looking for the suspect."
The unidentified gunman, who vanished into the Wallingford neighborhood after the shootings, remained at large last night.
Police expected to complete a composite sketch over the weekend, Joiner said.
The 19-year-old man who started working at Northlake two days before the attack was released from Harborview Medical Center Saturday afternoon, where he was treated for an arm wound. The 58-year-old fisherman is still recuperating in the hospital.
The 58-year-old fisherman, shot in the chest with a 9mm bullet, remained at Harborview in satisfactory condition after a brush with death.
P-I reporter Kimberly A.C. Wilson can be reached at 206-615-1246 or kacwilson@seattle-pi.com
This report includes material from The Associated Press.
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