The Town Hall murder scene (Image: SPD)
Details from Chief Adrian Diaz of the arrest of a First Hill resident in the brutal ax murder of a homeless man outside 8th Ave’s Town Hall last month reveal Seattle Police were secretly tracking a possible killer preying on Seattle’s unhoused.
Liam Kryger, 25, is being held in King County Jail on $5 million bail after being arrested by SWAT and police Sunday at Spruce and Broadway near his 10th Ave First Hill apartment. Prosecutors say they expect a charging decision in the case Wednesday.
Diaz revealed details of Kryger’s arrest two weeks after the killing in a lightly attended press conference Monday night as he described the SPD detective work that led to police pursuing a suspect carrying an ax early Saturday into Freeway Park. Diaz says the suspect was able to escape but dropped the ax.
Police were able to trace the ax to a February purchase at the Lowe’s store on Rainier Ave. Kryger was identified as the purchaser after a department of corrections officer recognized him from images police obtained of the home improvement store transaction.
According to the police report and initial court documents in the case, 52-year-old Daravuth Van was murdered as he camped near First Hill’s Town Hall, suffering a crushing blow to the head.
Police say the suspect can be seen in security video from the area and several businesses “walking slowly and looking around as he approached Victim Van’s location and then, after again confirming that there were no witnesses, he swings the weapon in a downward motion in the area where Victim Van was lying.”
“The suspect then walks out of the view of the video footage,” the police report reads.
Van’s body was discovered in a pool of blood early on the morning of Thursday, February 22nd. SPD publicly reported the incident a “suspicious death.”
The Town Hall murder followed a similar death discovered February 10th in a 12th Ave alley where longtime area homeless man Paul Ewell was found beaten to death in a pool of blood.
Another man was found with critical injuries early Saturday, February 24th in Cal Anderson Park.
The deaths and assault involving unhoused victims received little attention in the city and there also at least two attempts to run over homeless people with a car last month including this attack that left a man with minor injuries on 19th Ave E.
Diaz now says that SPD detectives were watching area streets and parks at night looking for a suspect.
“We don’t know if would be homeless or anybody walking in that area at night,” Diaz said of the suspect’s possible targets.
“He was potentially looking,” Diaz says at one point. “I think that potentially stopped what was another homicide,” he said.
We’ve asked the department as well as Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office and the office of District 3 city council representative Joy Hollingsworth for more information on why the public wasn’t warned earlier about SPD’s concerns.
CHS was one of many Seattle news outlets that either were not invited or did not attend Monday’s press conference.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for the mayor referred CHS to SPD for immediate questions about the investigation and how public notification was handled before longer term questions about policy and procedures are answered.
UPDATE x2: A spokesperson for Hollingsworth tells CHS they are also asking about the lack of public alerts from SPD about the concerns.
“Our office was not given any advance notice of this investigation, and SPD has not been sharing information about this case at our D3 community meetings,” the spokesperson said. “I’ve got a request out to SPD comms to learn more about the thinking behind this strategy and will let you know if I get any information back.”
UPDATE x3: A representative from SPD’s public affairs unit said he was gathering more information from department command but said decisions related to his unit’s activities were dictated by detectives and focused on “protecting the integrity of the investigation” and limited to “the information at that time.” Public safety is a primary concern in all SPD information bulletins and press releases, the representative said. “Information that we do and don’t provide is on the advice of detectives,” the SPD spokesperson said. As for why CHS wasn’t invited to the press conference where the arrest was announced, the spokesperson said several outlets were inadvertently left off the email announcing the briefing.
According to police and court documents, at the time of this arrest, Kryger was wearing the same “blue knit hat with red stripe, blue jeans pants, jacket and boots” as seen on footage from security videos capturing the suspect at the time of the Town Hall murder. Police say that when they showed the images to Kryger, he “admitted that the person in the photos was him.”
UPDATE x4: The King County Prosecutor says Kryger has been charged with murder in the Town Hall case:
Liam Harrison Kryger was charged with Murder in the First Degree. The case number is 24-1-00826-4. His next court date is his arraignment, where an initial plea is entered. That’s scheduled for 8:30 a.m. March 20 in room E1201A of the King County Courthouse.
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I am happy to hear this as homicides are not getting solved often these days.
I am hopeful that any charges stick and we have a dangerous person off our streets permanently. I manage several apartments in Capitol Hill, Queen Anne and a multi-family property across the alleyway from where Paul was found murdered on First Hill. I had spoken with Paul on a few occasions as he was friendly and quiet but would smile as I waved. Nobody deserves to die like that.
This is heartbreaking. Sad to think that the media narrative and the tone of the new council have dehumanized people living in extreme poverty that they are now prey for delusion and violent criminals. I hope people will be mindful of how that rhetoric fuels hatred against our neighbors who are down on their luck. I am glad to see this criminal be brought to justice so we can all be more safe. RIP to these Seattleites who did not deserve to die this way.
Alternative view: Enabling people to remain encamped in public is to enable them to be put at greater risk from drug OD as well as from assault. We should have never gone down the road of letting campers remain in place for months or years. It needs to stop. Custodial care of some kind, with conditions on sobriety and better mental health care, must happen or assaults like this will continue.
Rhetoric of enablement – “they can’t be forced off the street until they’re ready” and “we can’t arrest our way out of this crisis” … created a permanent class of homeless campers. That is what must stop. So-called harm reduction has been a total failure.
Really, you think the problem is that people are allowed to sleep out in the cold? You talk about forcing people off the streets, but to where? There are more people out there than there is shelter space, more than there are jobs that can employ someone living out of a restrictive shelter.
I always want to ask this of people making comments like yours… If you woke up one morning in their position, with no money and no contacts and no belongings except what you can carry, what would be your first step? Where would you sleep that night?
Harm reduction starts with housing, which is severely lacking, so it’s hard to say it’s been a total failure… The failure has been with the city, county, and state to provide adequate housing… They did all they could to attract the tech companies that were bouyed with cheap TARP money post recession and just let them destroy anything resembling affordability in Seattle…
What we’re experiencing now is that on top of a national fentanyl crisis…
Whom exactly were the enablers?
It will need to be seen through Kryger’s trial what his reason’s were for committing this murder. But it seems unlikely that the tone of a new city council, sworn in only 2 months now, would be the rationale for such a violent crime. If anything, the last city council is the one responsible for not making any meaningful progress on getting homeless people off the streets so that they aren’t sleeping in open spaces that leave them vulnerable to being murdered in their sleep.
The rationale is explained by him being immediately recognized by a DOC employee aka his parole officer. His socials show he was a quasi-homeless EDM guy who got his brain zapped by too many drugs. If he even knows the City Council exists as a concept I’ll eat a show
Seriously? This apprehension was based upon real concern and solid police work by the police, employed by us, supervised by the council and mayor. The prior council was the one that dehumanized via willful neglect, those living on our streets. And you have provided zero evidence as to the motivations and drive of the murderer.
Perhaps he was driven by the neglect of the prior council that truly treats addicts and homeless as disposable human beings. It is those who treat people as individuals capable of responsibility, accountability and change that convey dignity and hope.
Thank you SPD for this apprehension and the other 2 suspects arrested for murder in recent days. Now if you can work on those who deal meth, fentanyl and steal with impunity cars and stuff from homes and stores, we may have hope as a city. I’d love to see in place a policy whereby any stolen car or car without plates is stopped, whether it requires a chase or not. Criminal are rational people and if they realize that crime does not work or pay, they will in many cases back off some of what they do.
It has been reported that the perpetrator is an unemployed drug addict so we may want to get all the facts before pointing the finger at “the media narrative and tone of the new council”. I agree that this is a disturbing tragedy and am thankful to the SPD for solving the case.
I think it’s very unlikely that the “tone of the new council” or the “media narrative” have anything to do with this murder. Surely, the perp would not have any awareness of these two possible factors.
This is the smartest thing you’ve said on the site – people on blogs consistently think the larger public in all its variety is just as into being a spectator of local politics with steadfast opinions on it all as they are.
Then they make up weird ass ‘just-so’ theories that explain how everything under the sun that happens is related to a specific CM or the makeup of the Council and who the mayor is all to make a specific repeated point about how they don’t like it.
However, big however, the pulse of spectators clawing their eyes out in search of a once and for all solution and never finding it through shit like KOMO’s reporting does manifest…as comments on blogs
You are right no one deserves to die this way but it isn’t the media or the new council. This is an ongoing problem that the city, county and state haven’t addressed. We need more supportive housing, sober centers/houses, drug treatment centers and safe shelters professionally managed and audited and these needs go way back, and we’ve only recently allowed the police to interrupt drug sales and use.
I am so grateful to the team of investigators who worked to find and arrest this man. Although you mentioned that this had received little city attention, I think that pretty much all of us who read this blog were getting really worried by these repeated attacks and murders that someone was stalking unhoused people. To the friends and family of those killed, my sincere condolences.
Great detective work SPD!