SEATTLE, Wash. – Aaron Ybarra is being charged with multiple felonies in last week’s shooting that left one person dead and two wounded at Seattle Pacific University, King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said Tuesday.
The charges are one count of murder in the first degree and two counts of attempted murder in the first degree.
Prosecutors will seek a special sentence of life in prison, Satterberg said. Ybarra typically would face 69 to 86 years in prison if convicted of the charges facing him, but prosecutors will argue that an aggravating factor — a “destructive and foreseeable impact on persons beyond the victims” — allows for a life sentence.
In a journal entry before last week’s shooting, Ybarra expressed excitement and an expectation that he would die, Satterberg said.
“I just want people to die, and I’m going to die with them,” Ybarra allegedly wrote in one entry, according to Satterberg.
In another journal entry, Ybarra expressed “admiration for the perpetrators of other incidents of mass violence — at Columbine High School and at Virginia Tech University,” Satterberg said.
Satterberg said the entries also indicate Ybarra had considered shooting people at other campuses in Washington state but chose SPU shortly before the incident.
