RENTON, Wash. — The man suspected of shooting and killing a 17-year-old boy outside BIG 5 in Renton on June 5 was charged Monday.
Aaron Brown Myers, 51, faces second-degree murder and second-degree assault charges. He remains in jail on $2 million bail and will be arraigned June 24.
According to the Renton Police Department, the 17-year-old was shot at a Big 5 Sporting Goods parking lot around 7:45 p.m. on June 5.
The victim and two other 17-year-olds were walking into the store when there was an altercation between them and Myers.
Myers told police he had just finished working as a "licensed" and "armed" security person before driving to the parking lot to pick up his son from a martial arts class. Myers told police he has seen numerous crimes occur in the parking lots and conducts "overwatch" there to ensure his son is safe.
In charging documents, prosecutors argue Myers is not a member of law enforcement and has "not been trained in how to safely prevent crime."
According to court documents from the suspect's first court appearance, he claimed to have seen the teenagers walking into the store with what he believed was a firearm and thought they were going to commit an "armed robbery."
Rather than call 911 or wait for evidence, Myers "claimed he had a 'duty to intervene,' and did so," prosecutors write.
Investigators said the footage they watched contradicted Myers's statements in his police interview.
Myers told police he approached the teens with his gun down, telling them to drop their weapons and put their hands up. Security camera footage showed Myers confronting the teens with his firearm pointed at them, according to court documents. The teens were seen throwing what is actually an airsoft gun to the ground.
Myers said he had restrained one teen and saw another put his hand on the handle of the gun once, then a second time. At this point, Myers told police he thought the teen was going to shoot. Police said footage showed the teen only briefly lowering his hand towards his waist. Throughout the interaction, the teen's hands were empty, police said.
Myers fired at least seven rounds, striking the boy once in the side and at least six times in the back.
The other teenagers in the group told police they were at the sporting goods store to exchange the airsoft gun because there was a functional issue with it. According to the teens, they told the suspect "numerous times" that the gun was not real.
Prosecutors argue Myers attacked the teens and "at every stage of interaction chose to escalate with more and more violence" until the fatal shooting.
The King County Sheriff's Office was having a training exercise in the same parking lot and responded to the scene quickly. Deputies tried to perform lifesaving measures, but the teenager died at the scene.
According to charging documents, the June 5 incident wasn't the first time Myers chose to "intervene" after mistakenly believing someone was armed. In March of 2022, Myers followed a person carrying a metal object, which he thought was a gun, from one store to another. He did this, prosecutors wrote in charging documents, because he believed he "may need to intervene' and he 'might have to shoot' that person.
In that case, Myers had called 911 in which officers arrived and determined the person he was following did not have a gun and posed no threat.
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