SEATTLE — Prosecutors say that an off-duty security guard in a neighborhood of Seattle killed a 17-year-old boy by shooting him six times in the back while the boy and his friends were trying to return a toy gun to a sporting goods store that the guard thought was a real gun.
Police in King County, Washington, charged Aaron Brown Myers on Monday with killing Hazrat Ali Rohani outside of a Big 5 sporting goods store in Renton. One more charge of second-degree assault is against Myers, 51, because police say he held another teen at gunpoint.
Friends of Rohani told police that she and two other teens were going to the store around 7:30 p.m. on June 5 to return a paintball gun that wasn’t working. They walked right up to Myers, who was waiting in his car to pick up his son from martial arts class.
For the cops, Myers said he saw a teen carrying what he thought was a Glock handgun and another teen putting a gun in his waistband. Myers told the police that he didn’t have time to call 911 because he needed to stop an armed robbery. He then got out of the car and pointed his gun at the teens.
As Myers got closer, one of the teens moved to the side, and the other two stopped, raised their hands, and one of them put the airsoft gun on the ground. They told Myers several times that it was a “BB gun” and not a gun.
According to the probable cause statement that Renton police filed, Myers then pushed one of the boys onto the sidewalk and sat on top of him. Police say that Myers kept pointing his gun at Rohani even though he held his hands out in front of him to show that they were empty. When Rohani moved back, Myers fired, hitting the teen six times in the back and once in the right side.
On video, Rohani can be seen calling for his mother while he falls to the ground and holds his stomach. The other kid hid and called 911.
Rohani died at the scene, and Myers was arrested right away by the cops.
Michelle Scudder, Myers’ lawyer, said in an email that Myers thought he was seeing the start of a violent crime and wanted to stop it before anyone got hurt.
“This tragedy and the death of a young man have devastated Mr. Myers and his family,” Scudder said. During this investigation, we are sure that the evidence will show that Mr. Myers’ only goal that day was to keep himself and others safe from major harm or death.
Police said Myers said he had a “duty to intervene.”
A senior deputy prosecutor for King County, Lauren Burke, said in a court document, “The defendant failed to take the obvious step of securing the toy gun instead of assaulting the teen who had carried it.”
He was being held in jail in King County on a $2 million bond. On June 24, in Kent, Washington, there was going to be a preliminary hearing.
Burke said, “High bail, electronic home detention, and giving up all guns are the only ways to protect the community from a civilian who isn’t trained and thinks he must shoot people who haven’t hurt anyone.”
Myers works as a security guard, but it’s not clear where.
Police said that in March 2022, Myers tried to stop what he thought was a crime. Police say he called 911 and told them he saw someone on a bike pointing a gun at people. He stuck with the person until the cops arrived at a store. Police said they checked the person and found that they did not have a gun and did not pose a threat.
Burke said, “In this case, the defendant attacked three teens who had not done anything wrong and chose to escalate with more and more violence until it culminated in the defendant killing Rohani.”
Source: HuffPost
