An 89-year-old Seattle man was charged Friday with premeditated first-degree murder, accused of fatally shooting his wife with a shotgun days before he turned himself in to police, according to King County prosecutors.
The murder charge filed against Isaac Ealy in the death of his wife of 20 years, 82-year-old Alice Scott, includes an allegation the crime was one of domestic violence — making Scott the county's 10th domestic-violence homicide victim so far this year, according to Senior Deputy Prosecutor David Martin.
Ealy told an officer Tuesday at the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct that he had killed his wife, and he was booked into the King County Jail after police confirmed her violent death, charging papers say. He remains jailed in lieu of $2 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned June 23.
Ealy turned himself in to police "when discovery of his violent act appeared inevitable" by Scott's family, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Don Raz wrote in charging documents. And while Ealy acknowledged responsibility for killing his wife, "he showed little remorse," Raz alleged.
Ealy, who does not have any past criminal history, faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison if convicted of first-degree murder. Given his age, that's effectively a life sentence, Raz wrote.
Prosecutors estimate Scott was fatally shot in the bathroom of the couple's Capitol Hill home sometime between June 1 and 6. She died from a shotgun wound to the chest.
One of Scott's sons dropped by the couple's house in the 200 block of 15th Avenue on Monday but left after Ealy came to a window and told him Scott wasn't there, which was unusual, the charges say.
Ealy went to the East Precinct the next day and told the on-duty desk officer he had killed his wife in the bathroom and left a 12-gauge shotgun in his bedroom, according to the charges.
He gave police a key to his house, and they found Scott's body and the shotgun, as well as evidence the gun had been fired into the floor of Ealy's bedroom, the charges say.
Investigators found at least eight more guns and a variety of ammunition in a locked freezer in the basement.
Ealy told detectives he and his wife had "a bad relationship" and had been arguing, but the cause of the argument was unclear to investigators, according to the charges.
Sixteen of King County's 110 homicides last year involved domestic violence, according to Martin, who leads the prosecutor's domestic violence unit, and data compiled by The Seattle Times.
Eighteen of the county's roughly 116 homicides committed in 2020 were designated as crimes of domestic violence, up significantly from 2019, when there were four domestic-violence homicides among the county's 73 killings.
Preliminary data for 2022 shows 10 of the county's 37 homicides so far this year are alleged to have been caused by an intimate partner or family member.
"At [almost] the midpoint of 2022, we're on pace to roughly meet what we saw in 2020," Martin said.
