Ali Muhammad Brown

The effort to find the suspect in the June 1st murders that left two men shot to death at 29th and King after a night out on Capitol Hill has moved to the East Coast. Ali Muhammad Brown, 30, is suspected in a weekend armed robbery at a New Jersey coffee shop.

Police identified Brown as a suspect in the double homicide of 27-year-old Ahmed Said and 23-year-old Dwone Anderson-Young after the two had been partying on Capitol Hill and were on their way toward home in the Central District. The slayings have helped spark an effort to address public safety in the city following a tearful vigil held at 29th and King.

Tuesday, King County Prosecutors charged Brown with two counts of first-degree aggravated murder. Brown currently remains at large.

The charges reveal details about the hours that lead up to the murders but police say there is not yet a clear motive:

According to police, a friend of Said and Anderson-Young told detectives the two were meeting up with a third man that Saturday night after partying at R Place but that he had a “bad feeling” about the stranger. The friend told police that at closing time, he, Said and Anderson-Young left R Place to meet the man. The friend described the person as seeming “out of place.” Said offered to give the friend who talked to police a ride home but he said he declined the ride because he was “creeped out” by the man.

Another friend who met the group at R Place earlier in the night told police Said spent much of the evening on his phone and that he believed Said was using an app “like Grindr or Jack’d” — “These are phone apps on which gay men meet up with other gay men,” the police report notes. This friend told police he also saw the stranger with Said and Anderson-Young that night as they left R Place. That friend later identified the suspect Brown out of a police photo montage and was “100 -percent certain” he was the same person he saw with the victims outside the club.

Detectives were also able to retrieve video surveillance from a nearby business showing the suspect and Said and Anderson-Young together. Police say shell casings at the murder scene matched a 9 MM Smith and Wesson semiautomatic pistol purchased by the mother of Brown’s children that she said had gone missing.

The Seattle PI reports that a decade ago Brown was also tangled up in an FBI investigation into possible terrorist activity:

Brown was convicted of fraud following that FBI investigation. Agents determined that the men involved – presumably Brown – weren’t terrorists, though one prominent member of the group is thought to have been killed fighting in Somalia after fleeing prosecution in the United States.

In June, Brown was charged with failing to register as a sex offender following his conviction on three counts of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes.