Officer recounts finding Rafays

By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times Eastside bureau

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When Bellevue police Capt. Jim Kowalczyk first peered into Tariq Rafay's bedroom on a July night nine years ago, the scene was so horrific that Kowalczyk thought Rafay must have committed suicide with a shotgun.

Minutes later, Kowalczyk and another officer found Tariq's daughter, Basma Rafay, alive. After calling for medics, the two men found the body of Sultana Rafay, Tariq's wife and Basma's mother, in a downstairs family room.

" 'Double homicide-suicide' was my initial thought," Kowalczyk said yesterday on the first day of testimony in the aggravated triple-murder trial of Atif Rafay, the son of the family, and his friend, Sebastian Burns.

Atif Rafay, 27, and Burns, 28, are accused of bludgeoning Rafay's parents and sister to death with a baseball bat to cash-in on inheritance money. The crimes occurred inside the Rafay home in Bellevue's Sommerset neighborhood in July 1994, when both men were 18.

The defendants, both Canadian citizens, were arrested a year later, after they both were captured on videotape confessing to undercover Canadian police detectives.

The two spent six years in a Canadian jail, fighting extradition to Washington, where they potentially could have been executed if convicted. But there were more delays even after King County prosecutors guaranteed in March 2001 that they wouldn't face the death penalty.

First, Rafay asked for and received new attorneys because he couldn't get along with his old ones; then, in August 2002, the judge in the case dismissed Burns' defense team after Burns and one of his public defenders, Theresa Olson, were caught having sex in a jail conference room.

Defense attorneys representing Burns and Rafay have argued their clients were somewhere else when the killings happened and later were coerced into false confessions. They say, too, that police ignored forensic evidence that could point to another killer.

Kowalczyk was on duty when dispatchers put out a call just after 2 a.m. on July 13, 1994. Officers were being dispatched "to a call where bodies and blood had just been discovered," he testified. When he arrived, he glimpsed Rafay and Burns sitting on a curb, speaking to another officer, Kowalczyk said.

Kowalczyk and Officer Paul Haraldson were the first to go inside. Carrying flashlights, they drew their weapons and tried the front door. It was unlocked, and there were no signs of forced entry, Kowalczyk said.

Inside, they could hear a "gasping, gurgling" sound as though someone was struggling to breathe, he said.

They made their way upstairs and entered the first room, the master bedroom.

"It was pretty obvious" that Tariq Rafay was dead because "there was massive tissue loss, his head and face were unrecognizable and I knew from the pallor of his skin," Kowalczyk said. "When I first saw Mr. Rafay in his bedroom, my first response, because of the way he was lying, was suicide by shotgun."

Later, Kowalczyk went back into the room and noticed there was cash on the dresser, but he didn't see a gun. "I realized, 'Oh, there's not one (gun) here.' It kind of surprised me," he said.

Soon after finding Basma Rafay, Kowalczyk said Haraldson called to him from a room downstairs. "He told me, 'We've got another one,' " Kowalczyk said. He called a medic to confirm she was dead.

Later this week, King County Superior Court Judge Charles Mertel is expected to hear arguments about whether to allow testimony of informants who apparently reported that a group of radical Muslims might have been targeting Tariq Rafay or planning to kill him because of his mainstream, nonviolent reading of the Quran.

Mertel ruled last month, before the trial began, that defense attorneys hadn't established a connection between the crimes and the tips and refused to allow the jury to hear the information. The defense is asking the judge to reconsider his decision.

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com

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