The King County Prosecutor’s office has announced it has charged the suspect in Saturday’s deadly stabbing on the Capitol Hill Station train platform with second degree murder and intimidating a witness.
Shawn Patrick Moore, 26, was jailed following his arrest Monday by a U.S. Marshals task force that tracked him down in Eatonville.
Police and prosecutors says Moore killed Corey Bellett in a fight sparked when the Harry’s Fine Foods chef brushed by Moore and another man on the light rail escalator as the restaurant worker was on his way to catch a train home after a Saturday brunch shift.
The medical examiner says Bellett suffered three stab wounds: “one to the base of the neck, front left of midline, that perforated his trachea and the anterior side of the jugular vein, one to his left forearm, and one to his left torso.”
The medical evidence shows Bellett was unable to defend himself from the box knife attack. “No hand wounds were observed, though there were abrasion to the side of his chin,” the medical records note.
Prosecutors say the stabbing came as Moore and MW confronted Bellett on the platform and “pushes, slaps, and hair-pulling” ensued. Police say the video shows Moore suddenly pull a knife from his pocket and repeatedly stab Bellett.
During the attack, Bellett fell onto the light rail tracks where the assault continued, prosecutors say. Police described the attack based on the Sound Transit security video:
The Seattle Police report describes the terrible moments that followed.
“As Bellett ascends from the rail, there is visible blood falling to the ground from his body and he appears to be asking train patrons for help,” the report reads. “Transit security is seen calling for assistance. He kneels down, holding his neck and upper chest area.”
Police say security video showed one man fleeing the station dressed in camouflage shorts and another in a brown coat and pink shorts carrying a knife headed quickly for the station’s exit near Cal Anderson.
Seattle Fire responded to provide emergency aid to the victim on the subway platform 200 feet below Broadway and transport him to Harborview but Bellett succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.
He was 37.
A fundraiser has been set up by a family friend to help Bellett’s wife and family through the tragedy.
“Corey was a friend, a son, a brother, a new and deeply loving husband, an incredible chef who was wildly creative, talented, and insanely hardworking,” a tribute to the victim reads. A memorial of flowers and messages remains on the sidewalk outside Bellevue Ave’s Harry’s.
The memorial outside Harry’s Fine Foods (Image: CHS)
Moore’s charges include intimidating a witness. Identified as MW in the charging documents, police say video shows the man was part of the fracas that followed the run-in on the escalator and initially was part of heightening the tension in a verbal confrontation with the victim.
MW told police he called to report Moore’s involvement after the suspect left MW’s nearby apartment where the two had fled following the assault. Moore threatened to kill MW if he “snitched,” the witness said. When he saw on the news that Bellett died, MW said he called his mother and then police.
MW told police the physical fight on the platform came after Bellett told him to “go with his ‘faggot’ friend.”
“He tried to step between them and get Moore to back off, but he wouldn’t,” police report on MW’s account. “He saw Moore pull out a box cutter and stab Bellett approximately three times. MW stated he left the light rail station separate from Moore and headed back to his apartment. Moore caught up to him and told him he was coming to the apartment. MW didn’t want him to come back to his apartment, but he insisted. While they were enroute to the apartment, Moore had thrown something into a locked parking garage.”
Police would later find and recover the box knife from the Seattle Central Garage.
Moore will enter a plea on the charges later this month. The county prosecutor says Moore has not been charged by its office previously but a protection order filed in the county in November 2023 documented alleged mental and physical abuse of his girlfriend including an unreported stabbing. He remains jailed on $3 million bail.
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“Bellett told him to ‘go with his ‘faggot’ friend.’ No one deserves to die, why would Corey call someone this?
Where is the source of this quote?
Well, … it’s in the article above.
from MW, the guy who called 911.
An accomplice to the murderer who himself participated in escalating the attack.
Consider the source
always consider the source….
The article you are commenting on has that quote, its not hidden.
Doesn’t matter. Words are not violence, progressives can f-off with that mentality.
Or I miss read it. The overall story is hard to follow
Claimed the guy who was an accessory to the murder.
Capitol Hill is full of rich, professional-class types who don’t realize that, unfortunately, BOH kitchens, tradespeople, and more other working class industries still use this language daily. It’s not okay, but I bet most CH professional classes would be pretty surprised by the language of their hourly employee neighbhor.
Corey didn’t use language like that. I knew him well.
The e guy called his mom and then the police. Mom must have encouraged him to call. Good for her. If he hadn’t initiated contact there is no doubt he would have been caught eventually and he’d be in a lot more trouble than he currently is in.
Actually his action of calling 911 and helping the police track down the guy by providing his phone number might have saved MW from facing any charges.
What charges specifically would he face?
Accessory to murder.
I don’t think so. Video shows he tried to step between the two to stop the fight. It’s in the article.
The report also states he participated in escalating the situation and gave cover to the murderer in his apartment. He only made the report when he learned the victim had died, so he reports when it’s a murder rather than just a felony assault. Either way, it was his duty to report the info, and not just to save his own neck. The stabber had stabbed before, apparently.
For those wondering if this murder has anything to do with the thousands of drug zombies that have been attracted to the Seattle by the city’s failed harm reduction and housing first policies, here are a few clues from a Q13 article: “Court documents show Moore and the witness knew each other from the Roots Young Adult Shelter (U District)”. “Given Moore’s prior conviction (stabbing his girlfriend) and family connections to the East Coast, prosecutors argued that he poses a substantial flight risk, and asked for his bail to be set at $3 million.”
Plenty of people do drugs in houses too though, when they have access to one. You just hate the homeless and want to correlate those vulnerable people with violence. The real violence is the structural violence committed against the US homeless population by a society who refuses to solve an incredibly simple problem–to both maintain the concept of shelter as a lucrative commodity, and to tacitly threaten workers who dream of quitting but can’t because they would end up in the street.
Data shows housing first efforts effectively reduce homelessness, PERIOD. And I’m sorry, your attempt to make this tenuous connection worth investigating is not compelling.
Plenty of people get stabbed by non-homeless-adjacent folks too. Look at, oh I don’t know, all of Europe for example. There are virtually no homeless people (because of housing first and social-democratic welfare efforts) and yet many stabbings occur. Also, likely in lieu gun crime (ala USA) because they have incredibly limited access to firearms, which happens to leave blade weapons as one of the few more lethal options for violent retaliation.
Any more hypotheses, Sherlock?
It’s an incredibly simple problem? We spend billions of $$ each year collectively on the west coast trying to solve this problem. Perhaps you can let us all know how we can solve it with “one simple trick”?
What problem are you referring to? I gave a solution for homelessness above, which is housing first policies. Didn’t you read that part? If you want to complain about money, the only answer is taxes. Federal, state, doesn’t matter. That’s how you solve the equation…crazy, I know.
We’re constantly building luxury high-rises, so there is no excuse you can point to justifying why we’re continually doing that without providing for the poorest first. It’s pure greed and a lack of empathy from those that run our society, and specifically, it’s landlords in Seattle exacerbating our problem for private gain (we need public gains, like clean streets and houses for everyone to keep those streets clean).
Funny enough, all infrastructure connected to those new luxury buildings–roads, utilities and public services–used by the landlords and tenants alike are funded by our taxes, yet we choose not to deploy those same funds toward simply building affordable (or better yet public) housing. Not enough money? Tax the rich more. You’re completely unserious if you deny that option exists. Public housing specifically would be a federal fight, due to the racist cap placed on the quantity of housing called the Faircloth Amendment–look it up. That being said, nothing but political cowardice is preventing Seattle and every other city from building a plethora of housing for every single person, public or otherwise.
So, like I said above…one simple trick: build more housing…everywhere. We never caught up after the slump in construction post-2008. Did you ever listen to a single thing Kshama Sawant said? Or is that why you’re called “confused gay”?
Such a stupid whataboutism that people able to regulate their drug use in their home and aren’t moving across the country from violent pasts are = to this asshole and many others that seek the relative safe haven of Seattle.
Nah. It ain’t like that.
Exactly.
“Plenty of people get stabbed by non-homeless-adjacent folks too. Look at, oh I don’t know, all of Europe for example. There are virtually no homeless people (because of housing first and social-democratic welfare efforts) and yet many stabbings occur.”
This statement is 100% unequivocally NOT true. I just moved back to Seattle after living in Germany for 5 years and trust me there are still homeless everywhere on the streets. Yes the homeless situation is way more dire in Seattle but I think that has more to do with the Fentanyl and abhorrent drug use and lack of consequences for breaking the law. Yes, Germany has better social services but that definitely did not solve the problem. The homeless were aggressive and violent in Germany just like they are in Seattle.
Wouldn’t you be if you, for whatever reason, couldn’t get things to work out for you to get a home? Also, there are examples like Finland where they implemented a housing first policy and virtually removed the issue. There may always be outliers, because mental health is complicated, but don’t pretend that we can’t do waaaaaaaay better, being the richest country in the history of the planet.
Nope… you are still spouting nonsense. In Finland drug use is still criminalized… Yes, they do have a robust housing program BUT they also have jail with mandatory drug treatment for users and a robust and functional mental health system that allows for involuntary commitment…
Housing alone is not the answer and never was.
Oh and BTW.. Finland also has the highest rate in Europe of people under 25 dying from drug abuse….
https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/16/why-are-so-many-young-finns-dying-from-drug-abuse
Yeah – stick them in a house, it’ll all be fine and dandy – not..
It may be worth pointing out that Finland has a population of about 5.5 million for the entire country while Seattle alone has about 750k on its own.
Have you bothered to look at the mortality rate for the homeless in Finland?
If Seattle saw over 90% of the individuals who are 50 and over died within a short period of time once they became homeless like they do in Finland, which is horrifying and inhumane?
Finland’s homeless problems are not remotely the same as Seattle’s.
Germany has a homeless population of 31.4 per 10K, while the US is about ~19 perl 10K. There are more then a dozen European countries which have larger homeless populations then the US.
In particular, Germany keeps its homeless population in shanty towns situated outside of the cities, which are easily seen from the trains as they whoosh their way across the country side.
Sweden? Look at their history of dumping their homeless populations out of buildings in the middle of their winters.
Wow you’re so lost.
If Seattle had European levels of violent crime, we’d be in heaven.
And yes, I’m anti-homeless. The only thing I care about is to not have homeless in my city. That’s the ONLY thing I care about.
> The real violence is the structural violence committed against the US homeless population by a society who refuses to solve an incredibly simple problem
I’m fairly certain that the real violence here is BEING STABBED TO DEATH.
yeah, an incredibly simple problem that has never been solved at scale.
So, nothing about drugs, and the Fox 13 article actually says “given this domestic incident,” and nothing about an actual conviction.
Not sure if you changed the wording to suit your reactionary point, but if you want to be logical about it, maybe you should talk about the need for domestic violence to be taken more seriously in this country instead.
I am just connecting the dots. It seems likely that a twenty-something that is staying in a homeless shelter in Seattle rather than going back to live with his family on the east coast or in Eatonville that also stabbed his girlfriend in the leg during a domestic violence incident has some drug issues. It seems like his friend that went from living in a homeless shelter in the U District to living in his own apartment on Capitol Hill most likely moved into one of the five new supportive housing (also known as housing first) projects in the neighborhood. This is the job for an investigative journalist to untangle not me. But is is frustrating that nobody ever does this type of investigation because it raises hard questions about Seattle’s homelessness/drug policy and the fact that it has resulted in Seattle taking in many troubled souls from other part of Washington and the country. The concentration of people with serious issues in Seattle neighborhoods like Capitol Hill has had a huge impact on quality of life and safety in the neighborhood. We need a real conversation about this not the same old excuses. I can’t help noticing that almost every case like this has some connection to the homeless/drug crisis/mental health crisis and that many of the people involved have no connection to Seattle. How and why did they end up here homeless? For example, the ax murder from North Bend was placed in supportive housing on First Hill after a violent crime in North Bend and the guy that shot the pregnant woman in Belltown with numerous felonies had just moved here from Chicago. This is so much more that just a housing affordability crisis. There is a reason why the homeless/drug crisis is worse in Seattle than other places (other West coast cities with the same policies as Seattle excluded). My theory is that it is based in our ideology and permissiveness here that essentially roles out the red carpet for riffraff, while everywhere else is pushing them this direction. There are huge issues in this country that Seattle can’t and shouldn’t be trying to solve on our own. We are sinking because of it.
Your “drug zombies” fixation is awfully boring.
Perp: some guy from Auburn with a history of DV, and no reported history of involvement in drugs or drug crime.
Idiot in the comments: “Obviously this happened because Seattle coddles drug zombies”
This is so, so sad. Corey should still be alive, he was just trying to go home.