EVERETT — A year after a 21-year-old Seattle man was shot at a house in the Silver Lake neighborhood, family and friends are still waiting for news of whether the shooter will be arrested.
On the night of Feb. 25, 2019, Dustyn Hunt-Bagby, a musician who went by the name PrettyBoi Nabii, was at his girlfriend’s house in the 10600 block of 32nd Drive SE. He and his girlfriend’s father, 47, reportedly got into a fight. The older man allegedly shot Hunt-Bagby in the chest around 10:45 p.m., killing him.
Four people who were present remained at the scene and cooperated with Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies. No one was arrested.
Since then, the question for detectives has not been the shooter’s identity, but whether he fired in self-defense.
The investigation is ongoing, said sheriff’s spokesperson Courtney O’Keefe. Detectives are waiting on the Washington State Patrol crime lab to finish testing on a firearm and clothing recovered from the scene. It’s uncertain when those tests will be completed or whether charges will be referred to the prosecutor’s office.
Friends and family believe sheriff’s detectives haven’t taken the account of Hunt-Bagby’s girlfriend seriously. In a video posted online in the summer, Lauryn Heller said she and Hunt-Bagby were drinking wine and watching movies when she received a text from her father, saying people needed to be gone by 10:30 p.m.
Heller said she tried hiding Hunt-Bagby under a bed and left the house to trick her dad — something she’d done before.
As she waited by the window, she saw the light turn on and heard people yelling, she said.
She ran inside.
“I saw my dad standing there with a gun, and I jumped in front of him,” she said in the video, “because I thought if he saw me, maybe he’d put it down and stop.”
Heller said she and Hunt-Bagby were trying to leave when her father grabbed Hunt-Bagby and shot him. She said there was no reason to believe her father was in any danger.
In August, more than 40 people showed up at the Snohomish County Courthouse, chanting and waving signs and calling for the shooter’s arrest. At the rally, Hunt-Bagby’s mother, Lisa Ledbetter, recalled her son as peaceful and loving. It was “confusing to everyone” that he was described as an aggressor in the shooting, she said.
At the time, the sheriff’s office had expected the investigation to be wrapped up by the end of the year.
Hunt-Bagby’s friend Kellen Howe questioned the sheriff’s office’s approach to the case.
“The term, ‘investigation,’ it’s a loose definition of the term because there’s not really any investigating going on,” he said.
Howe called his friend Hunt-Bagby “a free spirit” who was full of positivity, and who was just getting started in the underground music scene of Seattle. Howe lived in Seattle with Hunt-Bagby and filmed his music videos.
“I think everybody could agree he was a very warm and positive energy in every situation,” Howe said. “There’s never a time he wasn’t making people comfortable.”
On Wednesday, family and friends gathered at Indianola Beach, south of Kingston, where Hunt-Bagby grew up.
“We sat around the fire, lit candles, listened to his music, shared memories, laughed and hugged,” said a post on the Facebook group Justice for Dustyn Coalition. “As the fire died down, we went to the water’s edge and watched his Mom scatter some of his ashes over the water. It was moving beyond words, a beautiful, still night which Dustyn would have loved.”
Zachariah Bryan: 425-339-3431; zbryan@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @zachariahtb.
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