Two found dead in Aurora Avenue motel

Chris Pierce got a call from a tenant, complaining about the overpowering odor coming from Apartment 11 at the Way West Motel on Aurora Avenue North on Monday.

He noticed a wastebasket hadn't been moved from the front porch of the apartment for more than a week. So around 12:30 p.m., Pierce, the manager of the 19-unit motel being converted to apartments, got a key and opened the door.

Inside, he saw a man's body on a love seat, and a woman's body in a chair. Pierce didn't even have to step inside to know both were dead. He called 911.

"I knew right away," said Pierce, 60. "The smell was awful. I didn't see any blood but then, I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking."

Homicide detectives and crime-scene investigators were dispatched to the scene, and based on their preliminary investigation, it appears the man shot the woman and then killed himself, according to Seattle police spokesman Mark Jamieson. A gun was found inside the 382-square-foot unit.

"It appears at this point that it's a murder-suicide and a gun was involved," Jamieson said, standing in front of yellow police tape stretched across the parking lot of an adjacent uniform-supply store.

The woman was 34, and her husband was approximately 10 years older, said Pierce. The woman has family in the area while the man was from somewhere in the Midwest, though he told Pierce he'd lived all over the country.

"He told me he didn't like it here because of the rain," Pierce said.

The couple wasn't behind on their $750-a-month rent and had lived there for three months, said Pierce, who lives two doors down from the couple at the motel. The woman would sometimes come by to borrow kitchen utensils from Pierce, or bring him ribs or other food she'd made, he said.

"They didn't cause any problems," Pierce said of the couple.

Pierce said he and the other tenants didn't hear anything that would have led them to call police earlier.

"No gunshots, no arguments, no nothing. They never even slammed their door," he said.

Conner Yasuko, of Seattle, who has owned the motel just north of North 85th Street for about thee years, said she and her husband are in the process of having the motel converted into apartments.

Seattle Times staff reporter Jack Broom contributed to this report.

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