Washington Cop With Odd Predilection For Seeing Knives And Shooting People In The Head Sentenced To 16 Years In Prison

Legal Issues

from the third-time's-the-charm dept

It’s very rare to see a cop charged with any crime in a shooting, much less charged with murder. It’s even rarer to see a cop convicted. It’s been happening a bit more recently, but that may just be recency bias now that more of the country is actively involved in combating police violence.

In the state of Washington, a recent law makes it easier to charge and convict cops when they use excessive force. Auburn, Washington police officer (obviously now former police officer) Jeffrey Nelson will be spending at least the next decade in prison for killing a person he claimed had grabbed his knife.

Former Auburn Police Officer Jeffrey Nelson was sentenced to 16 years and eight months in prison for second-degree murder after shooting a man while on duty in May 2019.

In a packed courtroom Thursday, Jan. 23 at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, with attendants spilling into the overflow seating and 200-plus viewers on Zoom, King County Superior Court Judge Nicole Phelps sentenced Nelson for the May 31, 2019, murder of Jesse Sarey, 26.

Nelson, 46, also received a 123-month sentence for first-degree assault against Sarey, however, that will run at the same time as the 200-month murder sentence. The judge’s sentence is 20 months short of the prosecution’s recommendation of 220 months and exponentially longer than the defense’s recommendation of 78 months.

There are a lot of notable things about this case, but perhaps nothing is more notable than Officer Nelson’s history of killings, which are all eerily similar. Here’s what happened in the case that finally put him behind bars:

After attempting to arrest Sarey, Nelson shot him once in the stomach and then once more in the forehead when he was on the ground. Sarey was the third person Nelson had killed as a K9 and patrol officer — the other two being 48-year-old Brian Scaman in May 2011 and Isaiah Obet in June 2017.

Here are more pertinent details, as related by Officer Nelson’s attorney, Kristen Murray.

Murray said that in the altercation that led to Jesse Sarey’s death, Nelson was in a fight for his life, and Nelson thought Sarey was armed with his knife that he had taken off Nelson.

“He wishes every day that he had seen that knife fall to the ground. Because then Mr. Sarey would be alive. Because he would have never shot a man that he knew to be unarmed,” Murray said.

His past actions no doubt contributed to this conviction, with an assist by the new state law addressing excessive force deployment. The jury got to hear these facts about previous use of deadly force by the officer, which definitely suggest Officer Nelson had his own particular set of patterns and practices:

Nelson killed Isaiah Obet in 2017. Obet was acting erratically and Nelson ordered his police dog to attack. He shot Obet in the torso and then the head after he fell to the ground. The police said Nelson’s life was in danger because Obet was high on drugs and had a knife. The city settled with Obet’s family for $1.25 million.

In 2011, Nelson fatally shot Brian Scaman, a Vietnam War veteran with mental issues and a history of felonies who pulled out a knife and refused to drop it after Nelson stopped him for a burned-out headlight. Nelson shot him in the head. An inquest jury cleared Nelson of wrongdoing.

This is a cop who sees knives and starts shooting people in the head. In a normal world, his supervisors might have recognized a disturbing trend before it put the officer behind bars. In a normal world, the cop would have been told to explore other employment options after costing taxpayers $1.25 million for his first killing.

This one — the one that’s putting him in prison — cost taxpayers another $4 million. And that’s on top of the $2 million in settlements Officer Nelson managed to rack up for other civil rights violations that didn’t end in the death of whoever he was “interacting” with.

If cop rap sheets were treated like regular rap sheets, they’d be seen as career criminals rather than just overly enthusiastic law enforcers who’ve just caught a few bad breaks. But no one expects criminals to hold themselves to a higher standard. Unfortunately, cops and their supervisors seem to feel they should expect nothing more from themselves than from the people they arrest. And they cling to that lower standard even after robbing taxpayers of millions and seeing their own crossing the line from law enforcer to lawbreaker.

Filed Under: auburn pd, excessive force, jeffrey nelson, police violence, washington