EDMONDS — One year, 100 potential witnesses and zero leads.
Fourteen minutes before midnight on Dec. 14, 2018, seven gunshots rang out during a private party at the Edmonds Senior Center. A crowd of people flooded out of the building, and a 23-year-old SeaTac man, Alexander D. Rhodes, was left lying on the ground, a bullet wound in his chest. He died at the scene.
Since then, police have developed little new information toward identifying a suspect, said Edmonds Police Sgt. Shane Hawley.
Detectives hope, still, that someone will step forward.
“Our goal is to bring this young man’s killer to justice, but we are going to need the people who were there to come forward and be honest about what happened,” Detective Andy Mehl said in a statement last January.
From the party of more than 100 people, only a few have talked to officers. And those few have provided varied amounts of information, according to the Edmonds Police Department.
Witness accounts initially led to a man’s arrest, but he was released when Snohomish County prosecutors chose not to file charges against him.
Cell phone footage, said to be taken around the time of the homicide, proved equally unhelpful.
The police department released an edited, five-second version of the video, showing people walking around and shouting. At the end, the person holding the phone zooms in toward a wall, but the video quality is too grainy to identify anything with certainty.
While the footage doesn’t offer any definitive evidence, officers said it showed a number of potential witnesses.
“You’re seeing chaos,” Sgt. Josh McClure said when the video was released.
“There are people there. There are people running around. There are people taking video.”
Tips can be directed to policetips@edmondswa.gov or 425-771-0212.
Zachariah Bryan: 425-339-3431; zbryan@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @zachariahtb.
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