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3 killed, 4 wounded in Seattle shooting; 15-year-old arrested

▶ Watch Video: Watch: Officials give update on deadly shooting near Seattle’s Space Needle

Three people were killed and at least four others wounded in a shooting at a food festival near Seattle’s Space Needle on Sunday evening, police said. 

Officers arrested a 15-year-old in connection with the shooting, although officials clarified that no one had been detained on homicide charges. The teen in custody was booked as part of a firearm and assault investigation, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said at a news conference on Monday.

Seattle Assistant Police Chief Tyrone Davis previously said that the incident involved two people they believe were shooting at each other. The second person remained on the loose as of Monday.

Davis said officers working in the area rushed in and confronted one shooter, which kept more people from being wounded. Two guns were recovered, he added.

Seven people were shot in all, officials said. CPR on two wasn’t successful and they were pronounced dead at the scene. They were identified as a 19-year-old man and a 44-year-old man. A third victim, a 56-year-old woman, later died at Harborview Medical Center. 

A 2-year-old boy, 39-year-old woman and 23-year-old man were also taken to Harborview and were in stable condition, Davis said, adding that a 40-year-old woman with minor injuries didn’t want to go to the hospital but showed up later at the University of Washington Medical Center.

The shooting occurred around 6 p.m. local time.

Seattle Shooting
Police cover a person after a shooting at Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle food festival on Sunday, July 26, 2026, in Seattle, Washington.

Estan Wakonabo

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Sunday night that several of its agents were at the scene and that Seattle police would lead the investigation. Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson said the state SWAT team also responded at the request of Seattle police.

The Seattle Center is a popular tourist location that includes the iconic Space Needle and Climate Pledge Arena, home of the Seattle Kraken and Seattle Storm. The area was filled with people attending the annual Bite of Seattle food festival when the gunfire rang out.

Several witnesses told CBS Seattle affiliate KIRO-TV they heard multiple shots before running away. 

“At first, thought there were fireworks, and then everybody flooded and ran past us,” Nick Bate told the station.

Leanne Coles told KIRO, “Everybody started running, and so we just ran too, and we ran through the garden and we ducked and we decided to keep running with the crowd until we got — I looked up for the Space Needle to try to keep track of where we were. It was really scary.”

The shooting in Seattle brought the total number of mass shootings in the U.S. this year to 271, according to the Gun Violence Archive which tracks gun violence in all 50 states. The tally includes incidents where four or more people were shot, not including the gunman. 

The numbers so far put 2026 on track to exceed the total of 407 mass shootings nationwide in 2025. That’s down from a peak of 611 mass shootings across the U.S. in 2021.

Trump asks Supreme Court to let him curtail mail voting

(CNN) — President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to allow the administration to move forward with implementing a sweeping executive order aimed at mail voting that lower courts blocked in nearly two dozen states — setting up a major elections dispute at the high court months before the midterms.Trump’s order would give the US Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security new roles in screening state voter rolls for potential non-citizen voters.Signed in March, the president’s directive would require states to submit lists of eligible mail voters to the US Postal Service, which would be barred from sending ballots to anyone not on those lists. It would also require states to use individualized ballot tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes. And it would “prioritize” federal prosecution of state election officials who send or receive ballots to non-citizens or others ineligible to vote.Despite revelations this month that about 400 non-citizens had cast improper ballots in New Jersey elections, improper voting remains exceedingly rare, and the administration has never provided evidence of widespread fraud on a scale that could influence the outcome of an election. Trump has for years nevertheless touted conspiracy theories about voting as a way to discredit the 2020 presidential election that he lost.In its appeal to the Supreme Court on Monday, the administration framed its executive order as “general policy guidance” and stressed that the Postal Service had not finalized any regulations.Twenty-three Democratic-led states challenged the order, noting that the Constitution leaves the running of elections largely to states, not the White House. A federal district court blocked its implementation for this year’s election in the states that sued, and the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision over the weekend.Two of the three appeals court judges in that decision were appointed by former President Joe Biden. A third judge, who Trump named to the bench last year, agreed with part of the court’s decision but would have allowed some of the president’s executive order to take effect.Despite its ostensible scope to just about half the country, the ruling effectively puts the USPS directives on hold nationwide, because the agency is unable to implement Trump’s order in some states but not others, according to court filings. A dozen Republican-led states have intervened in the case to defend the executive order.In addition to the directives for USPS, another section of Trump’s order instructs Homeland Security to provide lists of state residents it believes are eligible to vote, though the government has acknowledged in court that its own databases of US citizens are incomplete.Rather than defend the merits of its executive order, the Trump administration has instead argued that the Democratic states challenging it sued prematurely because much of Trump’s effort has yet to be implemented.“The executive order is an intra-branch directive from the president to his subordinates — which, of its own force, does not change anything at all about elections in any state,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court in the appeal. “It does not require the states to do (or refrain from doing) anything at all.”The administration asked for an immediate “administrative” order to put the lower court decisions on hold.But the 1st Circuit reasoned that local election officials have already had to devote resources away from preparing for this year’s election to figure out how to comply with the executive order. And some of them have already purchased ballot envelopes for this year’s election.“Given their limited resources, the states’ efforts have necessarily entailed a diversion of staff time and attention from other pressing election-related tasks – such as preparing public-education materials for voters and rolling out new voting technology – to coordinate the implementation of the changes articulated in the EO,” the appeals court wrote.US Circuit Judge Joshua Dunlap, a Trump appointee, agreed that the states should be allowed to sue over the envelope requirements. But he would have allowed DHS to create and send the lists of voters it believes are eligible to the states because the order technically doesn’t require state election officials to do anything with that information.Even before the March 2026 order, the Trump administration was ramping up efforts to use federal immigration data to hunt for non-citizens. However, the DHS citizenship data program that has been commonly used in that exercise is known to turn up false positives, prompting fears that eligible voters will be wrongly purged from the voter rolls.Trump’s emergency appeal marks the first time the administration has raced up to the Supreme Court with a short-fuse request since March — only the third such appeal this year. That is a marked departure from last year, when the administration filed nearly 30 emergency appeals on what critics have called the court’s “shadow docket.”The court requested a response to the administration’s appeal on August 3.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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