BELLEVUE — FBI agents have seized 27 boxes of items after searching the home of an airline pilot who is under investigation in the 2001 shooting death of an assistant U.S. attorney.
The boxes were taken Sunday in a four-hour search while the pilot was away, said a man who described himself as a house guest and would not give his name.
Patrick Adams, the top agent in the Seattle FBI office, would not discuss the search at the scene of the raid, saying the warrant had been sealed by a federal judge.
In a separate search last Wednesday, agents removed a bullet from the wall of a house in Bellingham where the pilot once lived.
FBI spokeswoman Robbie Boroughs told The Associated Press she could not comment on any aspect of the investigation. She did say that in general it can take anywhere from a matter of days or weeks for ballistics tests to determine whether bullets have been fired from the same gun.
Efforts to reach the pilot Monday were not successful. His attorney, Larry Setchel, was out of town and did not immediately return a call from the Associated Press.
The pilot, who has not been arrested or charged, has been identified in documents filed in U.S. District Court as the only potential suspect in the fatal shooting of Thomas Wales, an assistant U.S. attorney gunned down at his home in Seattle on Oct. 11, 2001.
Wales, 49, a white-collar crime prosecutor and ardent gun-control activist, was shot through his basement window as he sat at his computer that night. A witness told investigators she heard several shots and saw a man walk quickly to a parked car and drive away.
The pilot, a man in his a man in his 40s, was indicted by Wales in 2000 in a fraud case involving the renovation of a Vietnam-era military helicopter for civilian use. The following year, charges against the pilot and his business partners were dropped, and the company pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
The pilot sued the government for malicious prosecution, seeking recovery of more than $125,000 in payments to lawyers, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.
The FBI first searched the pilot’s home in December 2001.
In the Bellingham search, agents cut out a 22-inch by 9-inch piece of plasterboard at the top of a staircase and removed "one silver bullet" from a wall stud, according to an inventory left with the renters.
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