The King County Superior Court found probable cause Thursday to hold Jahmed Haynes jailed for Murder in the First Degree and Animal Cruelty in the First Degree in Tuesday’s deadly carjacking in Madison Valley.
80-year-old dog walker Ruth Dalton was dragged and killed in the incident. Dalton’s dog was also stabbed to death. Police say witnesses attempted to intervene to stop the attack including one man who tried to stop the carjacking armed only with a baseball bat.
According to the police information filed in the case, Haynes was arrested Wednesday after being tracked down by police at 15th and Pine just blocks from his residence in a Summit Ave weekly hotel.
Police say Haynes also had fresh stitches on wounds on his hands when he was taken into custody.
CHS reported here on Wednesday’s arrest. Police say they found Haynes’s fingerprint on the victim’s phone left in her Subaru Forester and that a bloody knife and the victim’s key fob were found with the suspect. A witness told police they saw a man matching Haynes’s description at the park where Dalton’s car was ditched and her dog was found stabbed to death. Haynes has a prosthetic leg making him easily identifiable.
Police also have photographic evidence from the area around where the carjacking took place.
The King County Prosecutor’s Office says it expects to make a charging decision in the case on Monday. A hearing to set Haynes’s bail is scheduled for Friday.
At a press conference announcing his arrest, police said that Haynes was an eight-time convicted felon with a history of mental health issues.
Prosecutors said Thursday that the 48-year-old hadn’t been involved with a serious crime in King County since a 1999 robbery case.
Haynes’s criminal record also includes a 1993 vehicular homicide conviction, according to the county.
His misdemeanor record in the city also dates back more than 25 years ago.
Police say Dalton was driving for her work as a dog walker when Tuesday morning’s attack took place. Client dogs were in the vehicle when it was stolen and witnesses described multiple dogs running loose in the street following the carjacking, police say. Those dogs were reunited with their owners.
Neighbors and nearby businesses are remembering Dalton with a memorial of flowers, cards, and messages near where the she was killed at MLK and Harrison.
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Lock up in the cellar of the jail and toss the key. Forever.
That should have happened when he murdered someone with a car in 1993. Here’s hoping the judge gets it right this time.
While you’re letting yourself be ruled by medieval blood lust, why not have him drawn and quartered?
That’s a very messy solution but it has the benefit of keeping the criminal off the publics budget. And we do have pretty big budget deficits!
This whole terrible incident makes me angry in so many ways. Why are people like this on the street? He’s already killed someone, he’s an 8 time felon with mental health issues. WTF? Why is he out on the street? Yet I know the answer. Our criminal system and mental health services capacities in Seattle are broken, perhaps beyond repair. This is the new normal until something truly radical, massively expensive, and far reaching is implemented. But that won’t happen until 10 or 20 more people die at the hands of these barely human train wrecks.
I hope someone in the criminal justice system will explain why he was free to commit this horrendous crime. Is the “three strikes” law no longer in effect? If it isn’t, and he has significant mental health issues, why wasn’t he committed to a mental institution until he no longer was a danger to society, e,g. forever?
Hopefully we can put this whole phase of not putting people in jail behind us. I think (hopefully, crosses fingers) that we’ve moved past the disaster of the last decade
That was Covid and the remnants of the policies that some latched on to, to make them permanent. When it was only intended for a singular, specific reason (Covid isolation). Some ultra left wings folks don’t want jails and bail. Prisons do serve a purpose. Incarcerating an entire race isn’t one of them. Prisons are not the problem. It’s the way we run them that is the issue.
There’s a reason you can’t rent apartments to people w/o any limit as to who and how many are living there. Fire codes mainly. But humane conditions are in that equation as well. Public safety.
Kinda like the $3 an hour “temporary” help for ‘small businesses’. The PPP “loans” that are grants actually. Greed is disgusting. It’s a form of bullying. I hate bullies. They are all liars is why. That makes them dangerous. They ruin people lives. This dude obviously cares only about himself and will spend life behind bars.
He had stable housing and mental health services and still decided to commit his 2nd murder in his half century or so on this planet.
This goes against pretty much every naive narrative spun by our clueless progos here in Seattle over the last decade or so.
Some people need to be either locked up or institutionalized. We don’t have the latter, so the former will do just fine.
I would like to know the names of the judges that have been on his cases in the past. Hope he’ll be locked away forever.
How does someone only serve a couple of years for vehicular homicide? He should have been in prison longer.