Dad charged with killing daughter’s date after finding him in her room, WA officials say

A Washington father has been charged with second-degree murder after a 2019 shooting that killed his daughter’s boyfriend, officials said.

Charles Heller, 49, is accused of shooting Dustyn Hunt-Bagby, the man his 20-year-old daughter was dating, after finding him in her room at night, according to charging documents from the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney.

Heller was charged Monday in Snohomish County Superior Court with second-degree murder nearly two years after the shooting, officials said.

“This was what I was waiting for,” Lisa Hunt, Hunt’s mother, told The Seattle Times on Monday. “This charge means so much. … I started to lose any type of hope for justice. I felt like it was slowly being forgotten about and brushed aside.”

On Feb. 25, 2019, officials with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office responded to Heller’s Everett home before 11 p.m. after receiving calls from Lauryn Heller, Charles Heller’s daughter, and Abby Heller, his wife, according to the charging documents.

“Two separate 911 calls came from this location at around the same time,” the charging documents stated. “The first caller, Lauryn Heller, was frantic and stated that ‘somebody had been shot’ and that she needed someone there ‘immediately.’ The second call came from Abby Heller who calmly stated, ‘Yeah, I need the police at our house, we have someone at our house we don’t want.’”

Deputies found Lauryn Heller on the front porch of the home “hysterical,” according to the charging documents. She told officials her dad had shot Hunt.

Charles Heller and his wife told investigators that they had a rule for their daughter that no one was allowed to stay in the house overnight, according to the documents. They had texted their daughter that they wanted everyone “out of the home by 10:30,” the charging documents stated.

When there was no response, Heller armed himself with his pistol, he told investigators. He later found Hunt under the bed “in his underwear and an undershirt,” Heller told officials.

“According to the defendant, he stood up, aimed for the victim’s shoulder and shot him one time,” according to the charging documents. “He admitted that he never thought about punching the victim or hitting him with the gun, and that the shooting was entirely intentional (rather than the gun accidentally going off) because, according to him, he was afraid the victim was trying to choke him.”

Hunt died of “right hemopneumothorax” because of a single gunshot wound in his chest, a chief medical examiner said after an autopsy. The death was classified as a homicide.

This story was originally published January 26, 2021 at 11:02 AM.