SEATTLE (AP) — Preliminary testing showed the bullets that killed two bystanders during a shootout at a crowded Seattle food festival last weekend didn’t come from the gun a 15-year-old arrested at the scene was seen firing, police said in court documents filed Wednesday.
The teen repeatedly shot an untraceable ghost gun into a crowd, police said, and the King County prosecutor’s office filed charges of first-degree assault with a firearm and unlawful possession of a handgun.
In a statement supporting the charges, police said preliminary testing of bullets recovered from the two bystanders killed showed they did not match that weapon.
The shooting in the waning hours of the Bite of Seattle festival near the Space Needle left three people dead, including a 19-year-old suspect, and at least four bystanders injured, including a toddler. Police believe it was gang-related, and they continue searching for others who might have been involved.
Police Chief Shon Barnes had previously said there was possibly another person with a gunshot wound that investigators were looking to speak with, but the department said Wednesday there was no eighth victim.
Testing on shell casings found at the scene suggest four weapons were fired, the statement said. Police said they recovered three guns, but only two of them had been fired, which means two weapons involved in the gunbattle were not found at the scene. It isn’t clear which weapon or weapons fired the bullets that hit the festival attendees.
Dozens of officers were at Seattle Center, a sprawling park, providing security for the event, when the shooting began. Some heard the gunshots, and one officer saw the 15-year-old firing, police said.
A witness told investigators that he heard gunshots and saw the people around him duck, Detective Matt Blackburn wrote in the statement. The witness saw a man in a light blue top who started running; the witness believed that was where the first shots came from.
The witness reported that he then saw the 15-year-old unzip a bag that was strapped around his torso and pull out a gun with an extended magazine. The teen shot multiple times toward the other suspect, Blackburn wrote. Two shell casings from the teen’s ghost gun were found at the scene.
The teen surrendered when confronted by an officer. As police escorted him past the dead 19-year-old's body, he said, “Love you bro,” Blackburn wrote.
Prosecutors on Wednesday asked a judge to move the case to adult court, a decision that can take months after the judge considers arguments from both sides. The teen's public defender, Hong Tran, said in an email Wednesday the teen would contest the effort to try him as an adult.
If the teen is convicted as an adult, the charges would carry a sentencing range of about eight to 10 years in prison, plus possibly another five years for the firearm enhancement. However, judges in Washington may also choose to sentence juveniles as juveniles even if they are convicted in adult court.
In juvenile court, the charges would carry a sentencing range of two to 2 1/2 years. It was not immediately clear whether the firearm enhancement might add additional time in juvenile detention.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the dead bystanders as Carlos Israel Sanchez Villalba, 44, and Ashley Whitehead, 56. The suspect killed was Junior Cee Niko Semo, 19.
Villalba was a husband and father of three known for his kindness and willingness to help others, according to a GoFundMe campaign launched Monday to help his family with funeral expenses.
Whitehead had just moved to Washington from Alabama a year ago and was enjoying the festival with one of her adult daughters when she was shot, her cousin Michelle Whitehead told The Associated Press. She was taken to the hospital and died in surgery, she said.
The police department opened an online portal on Wednesday for the public to share video and photos from the shooting.
Michelle Whitehead, right, cousin of victim Ashley Whitehead, attends the vigil for victims the day after a shooting at Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle food festival, Monday, July 27, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
A memorial for victims of a July 26 shooting is seen at Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle food festival, Tuesday, July 28, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Flowers and candles are seen placed with the Space Needle at background, during the vigil for victims the day after a shooting at Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle food festival, Monday, July 27, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The stop-start fighting between the United States and Iran appears to have entered a new phase as Saudi Arabia publicly joined military escalations against Tehran-backed proxies. At the same time, an already untenable diplomatic effort to end the war has faltered once again as mistrust deepens between the longtime adversaries.
Despite several days of relative calm, both sides carried out military strikes in the last 24 hours that once again risk a return to all-out war — and further expansion in the region — while little is clear about what strategy, if any, American or Iranian officials have for a path forward.
While President Donald Trump and his allies have spent recent days arguing that Iran is begging to return to the negotiating table, Iran’s deputy foreign minister said Tuesday that his country has made no requests to restart the diplomatic track in more than two weeks.
Following a thwarted attack on the U.S. base in Jordan, Trump turned back to threats Wednesday even while sustaining the prospect of continued talks.
“They’ve already apologized, but, you know, we got to smack them a little bit,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. He added: “It’s our turn, and we’ll see if we get there with an agreement at some point. But we’re going to hit them very hard.”
Hours later, the strikes followed as the U.S. military said it launched a “a powerful response to yesterday’s attempted Iranian attacks on U.S. forces based in the Middle East” in a social media post. It did not immediately disclose the targets of the attack.
It reflects a deja-vu as the Republican president has vacillated for the past several months between insisting a deal was near to end the war and Tehran's nuclear program and using vulgarities and threats to get Iran to capitulate to U.S. demands — to no avail.
The stakes for continued U.S. military action have never been higher for Trump and his party as the conflict, unpopular among many Americans, has jolted the world economy just months before critical midterm elections in November. The renewed fighting also has killed and injured more American troops and been complicated by concerns that the U.S. is further drawing down stockpiles of key air defense systems needed to defend its bases and allies.
In the past day, Iran said it fired ballistic missiles at Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, a key U.S. military hub for the region, which Trump said were intercepted. And Saudi Arabia joined the U.S. in striking multiple logistics and weapons sites used by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
The first publicly announced joint U.S.-Saudi strikes followed drone attacks on the kingdom, complicating a conflict that now includes nearly every country in the region. A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to detail sensitive military operations, said the two attacks were not connected.
Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman was at the White House on Wednesday and met separately with Trump and Vice President JD Vance, according to a person familiar with matter who was not authorized to comment publicly about the private meeting.
Drone strikes also ignited fires on two natural gas vessels at a port in Egypt, a close U.S. ally and regional mediator that is one of the only countries in the Middle East to have been spared from direct military action during the war. A strike by Iran or its allies, if confirmed, would mark a significant widening of the conflict.
The U.S.-Saudi strikes came hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu departed his first meeting with Trump since they launched the war against Iran on Feb. 28.
An Israeli official briefed on the meeting Tuesday at the White House said Netanyahu assured Trump that it is the U.S., not Israel, that is in the driver's seat with Iran, attempting to push back on the notion that he’s increasingly out of step with his closest ally on the way ahead.
Yet, Israeli officials also have privately expressed concern that Trump, with midterm elections looming, is trying to “keep this war on a low flame,” according to a person familiar with Netanyahu's government’s internal deliberations. The person and the Israeli official were not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The person added that Israeli officials have become increasingly concerned about Trump’s sensitivity to surging oil prices as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to global energy shipments and about the growing trepidation among some in the U.S. administration about the burn rate of critical missile interceptors.
The recent fighting with Iran used up more of the U.S. military’s already diminished stockpiles of Patriot and THAAD interceptors, potentially putting American troops at more risk if hostilities resume, according to an analysis released this week from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has told Trump that the state of the munitions stockpile could have an impact on military operations in Iran, according to another U.S. official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations, said the message was delivered as part of Caine’s regular duties of providing military advice and options to Trump.
The Trump administration does not seem to have a strategy to resume negotiations with Iran over ending the conflict.
Despite efforts by some mediators to get talks restarted — or at least find a point at which they could begin again — the administration is not actively pursuing talks at the moment, a senior U.S. official said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the latest developments in the region suggested that any resumption in direct diplomacy was not imminent.
Analysts called the uncertainty and lack of strategy a result of deep, growing mistrust between Washington and Tehran, especially after an interim ceasefire proposal signed in mid-June collapsed in recent weeks.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said senior Iranian officials were nearly unanimous in their decision to approve that memorandum of understanding with the U.S.
“But now none of them believe that Trump is a reliable negotiating partner,” he said. "The problem, I think, is that Trump also has now the same impression about the Iranians."
In some respects, the on-again, off-again nature of talks and back-and-forth military attacks should not be surprising.
The history of U.S. negotiations with Iran after 1979 is littered with failure, false starts and stops, and military actions that have nonetheless stopped short of the kind of conflict the two countries are now in.
Despite its flaws, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran secured by the Obama administration was the first major agreement between the two countries since the Algiers Accords in 1981 that ended the American hostage crisis and laid a patchwork path for the resolution of other issues, including the unfreezing of Shah-era Iranian assets seized by the U.S. after the Islamic Revolution.
However, even from the beginning, both sides accused each other of violating the terms of these deals.
Accusations of violations of the Algiers Accords, which led to a period of great animosity, including U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, became the norm.
Despite the semi-rapprochement around the 2015 nuclear deal, Trump’s withdrawal from it in 2018 during his first term, his imposition of a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Tehran, and the U.S. assassination of Iran’s top military leader Qassem Soleimani in early 2020, sent the relationship to new lows.
Amiri reported from New York. Associated Press writer Ben Finley contributed to this report.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, speaks to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, right, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, before the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Tuesday July 28, 2026, at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump attend the dignified transfer of four U.S. service members recently killed in the Middle East, Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at Dover Air Force Base, Del. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
