CONTENT WARNING: This story contains descriptions of police violence and a mention of assault on a child.
The moment the crime scene opened after Spokane County Sheriff’s deputies killed her brother in his friend’s old trailer house in Deer Park, Dawn Hegel was confused and in shock. But she shook off what she could of the fresh grief, walked onto the property and began taking photos and collecting evidence police investigators had left behind.
It was about 8 am on March 30, 2024, one year ago this past Sunday. There was blood in the off-white carpet and an empty shell casing in the laundry basket. There were bullet holes in the door and a pair of mechanic’s gloves — which Donald had used to fix cars — in a strange position under the bed.
The night before, on March 29, a Sheriff SWAT team had tried for hours to get Donald Hegel to surrender to an arrest warrant for the alleged rape of a child, a charge he had been facing for years. He wouldn’t give himself up, and the team eventually invaded the house and fatally shot him.
Pieces of Donald’s skull lay near the spot in the bedroom where he’d taken a bullet to the head.
“When I walked in, I said, ‘Is that my brother?’” Dawn told RANGE in an interview. “I just lost it. I still have nine pieces of Donald at my house, in a little ziplock baggie hidden underneath my bed.” (Since that interview, she’s turned them over to a lawyer.)
[Editor’s note: It is important to note that while Hegel was facing an accusation of a violent crime, he had not yet been convicted of it. Under US law, everyone has a right to due process and to face their charges in court.]
Police on the scene that day had told her Donald had been standing on the hood of a truck parked in front of the house, she said. Dawn didn’t buy it, and police reports do not mention Donald being on the hood of any vehicle.
“There was no way,” Dawn said. “Hoods were up on both vehicles. … There was no way that he could have climbed up there.” RANGE saw photographs of the vehicles Dawn took that morning: the hoods were open. She saw this as a gap in the official narrative, one of many small details that made no sense and made her question whether she was being given the runaround.
This was not Donald’s first standoff with law enforcement for this charge. In 2019, Donald, holed up in a house in Spokane Valley, had withstood hours of chemical gas that a SWAT team had deployed as they’d served a warrant for the same child rape charge. One of the sheriff’s officials on the team, Deputy Travis West, would also be on the team that killed Donald in 2024. In 2019, Donald had shut himself in a closet and stuffed a towel under the door. Police said Donald threatened to shoot them, but as he would be in 2024, he was unarmed.
The deputies arrested him and he went to trial in Spokane County for criminal mischief charges stemming from that standoff and was released after 76 days in jail. He was then sent to jail in Stevens County, where he stayed until Dawn bailed him out in May 2020 on a $100,000 bond — more than a year after he first went to jail. Four years of court proceedings, continuations and moving trial dates followed until a Stevens County judge issued another bench warrant for Donald on March 27, 2024 and his bond was forfeited.
In November, Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell determined the killing was justified: Donald had not cooperated. He’d been “armed” — with a cigarette lighter that looked like a pistol.
Dawn is not an investigator — she’s disabled and runs a small store and a towing company with her husband in Ford. She’s just a woman who saw some things in a police investigation that didn’t make sense to her. She can’t kick the feeling she’s being jerked around. She’s called Haskell’s office many times and has either been ignored, or receptionists have hung up on her. She would like to ask him about the discrepancies she sees in her brother’s case. It didn’t add up, so she wants to hear from him how he came to his conclusion.
Haskell told RANGE he refuses to meet with her as a matter of policy. Because of this, Dawn feels there needs to be an independent authority, unburdened by the strong relationships that can form between local cops and prosecutors, that could investigate and if necessary, prosecute her brother’s case.
Haskell has a reputation for siding with police in Spokane County. He’s a local law enforcement official and, like any prosecutor, works closely with other local law enforcement officers. He has never found a police killing to be unjustified in his decade-plus career as prosecutor, despite Spokane’s consistent ranking as one of the most deadly policing environments in the nation.
Glimpses of hope have briefly surfaced. During the last four legislative sessions in Olympia, lawmakers have tried to create an authority outside of that cozy working relationship: a state-level Office of Independent Prosecutor (OIP).
“It gives an opportunity that they’re not investigating themselves,” Hegel said. “Because no matter what, Larry Haskell works for the cops.”
But the bills that would have created that office — SB 5584 and HB 1740 — died earlier this session because lawmakers, who are facing down a dramatic budget deficit, don’t want to pay for them. At the same time, a bill that would allocate millions to hiring new police has passed the House of Representatives and is currently being debated in a Senate Committee.
Police accountability laws have little effect in Spokane
State laws governing how police use force and how they are held accountable if they break the rules are complicated and evolving, but crucial to understand.
In 2019 and 2021, a slate of hard-won policies were enacted in Olympia. They included, among others, these reforms:
- The formation of county-level investigative forces that would, in theory, insulate sheriffs offices and police departments from the appearance of a conflict of interest in police killing probes. Spokane County’s is the Spokane Independent Investigative Response (SIIR, pronounced “sear”) Team. When a cop kills someone, the team mobilizes independently of the department that used deadly force. The Spokane Police Department (SPD) formed a SIIR team to investigate Donald Hegel’s killing.
- Police were required to undergo deescalation and mental health training and to render first-aid when they used force.
- The state established an Office of Independent Investigations (OII) that would have the authority to probe — but, notably, not to prosecute — deadly uses of force by police in any jurisdiction. The office, built from scratch, had a slow start and three years later, is now working on its first two formal investigations: one in Centralia, the other in Vancouver.
These were watershed years for police accountability in Washington. But the laws have not put a dent in police killings in Spokane County. SPD officers and sheriff’s deputies killed at least six people in 2024. As of publication, the nonprofit research group Mapping Police Violence ranks SPD as third-most-deadly department in the country, killing on average 9.7 people per one million people from 2013 to now. SPD is behind the Albuquerque Police Department at 10.3 killings per million people and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department at 14.7 killings. The group does not track sheriffs departments.
The last police officer who was prosecuted for killing someone in Spokane County was Karl F. Thompson who in 2006 beat and used a TASER on Otto Zehm, a developmentally disabled man, until he died. Thompson was found guilty in 2012, but only after the US Department of Justice stepped in and took over the case. Thompson was sentenced to 51 months in prison and three years of subsequent supervisory release. Other officers were later investigated for lying to protect Thompson, including one who went on to work for the Spokane COPS nonprofit.
Across the country, less than 2% of police killings are prosecuted. Far fewer cases result in convictions.
Doom loop
As currently structured, the findings of Washington’s OII investigations wind up back in the hands of local prosecutors — in Spokane County’s case, Haskell, who has already ruled killings like that of Donald Hegel’s to be justified.
Haskell defended his office’s processes to RANGE, writing: “My decisions have been complained of on occasion,” he wrote. “However, senior attorneys with years of prosecution experience are consulted before a conclusion is reached, and I am fully confident in the conclusions reached. This is not a popularity contest. It is not a roll of the dice. Decisions result from a careful analysis of the facts and the governing charging standards, not political winds of change. I will never depart from Constitutional standards. Not now. Not ever.”
But police accountability activists and some lawmakers believe that local prosecutors work too closely with local police to inspire confidence in their conclusions.
That’s the impetus for the OIP legislation — creating a new structure that would receive investigations from OII that isn’t an office that may have already decided not to prosecute an officer for a killing. It would also neutralize the perception that local prosecutions are hampered by cozy relationships between prosecutors and local cops.
“It is important to have someone who does not have a relationship with the law enforcement agency or even that individual officer that’s being investigated,” said Senator Manka Dhingra, (D-Redmond), who sponsored SB 5584 and is herself a former prosecutor in King County.
In his email to RANGE, Haskell bristled at the OIP legislation. “I believe a goal of the proposed legislation is to promote politically, race and/or gender-based prosecutions,” he wrote. “Such would be repugnant to constitutional and ethical standards. The Fourteenth Amendment mandates the equal application of the law. Period. Every time.”
He also said that, per existing state law, local prosecutors are the appropriate authority to decide whether a police killing should be prosecuted.
“The political winds have changed due to the fact that certain members of the public do not feel that enough police officers are/have been prosecuted in officer involved situations; not just in Spokane County, but across the country,” Haskell wrote. “Prosecutions should not be based on a politically-based desire for a certain result.”
Cone of silence
Though the lead investigator of the crime scene, SPD Detective David Eckersly, shared a number of documents with Dawn via email and Dawn has received some records she’s requested from the county, she hasn’t gotten back other documents or body camera footage that was recorded during the standoff. Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels invited her via email to come watch the footage with him alone in his office, but she doesn’t like that arrangement. She wants the full public to see the footage, which RANGE has requested under public records laws. More than that, she wants Haskell to face her.
But Haskell doesn’t think he owes her any attention. “I don’t meet with family members after these events, as such discussions seldom lead to positive resolutions,” Haskell said in an email to RANGE. “Seldom, if ever, would they be satisfied with my conclusions. They are grieving, and I understand that.”
He has not explained that rationale to Dawn, saying opening the door even enough to say he won’t talk to her would risk opening a conversation.
It’s resulted in another stand-off: Dawn hasn’t stopped calling, trying to get answers, and Haskell’s office hasn’t stopped dodging. Receptionists have either not passed her messages to Haskell or he’s chosen not to return them. Sometimes, they’ve hung up on her when she’s mentioned Donald’s name.
The last time she tried to get Haskell’s office to talk to her, a victim’s advocate called her back and asked to speak to Donald, her dead brother.
Accountability costs too much, but there’s money for more cops
Opposition from prosecutors like Haskell was not the only hurdle the bill faced. Police lobbies and some lawmakers, including Senator Jeff Holy, a Republican who represents parts of West Spokane, have argued that such an office would be redundant to existing structures and deter applicants from applying to Washington police departments.
Teresa Taylor, executive director of the Washington Council of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, told lawmakers during public testimony over the OIP bill that there are already many layers of police accountability in Washington, making the OIP unnecessary.
“Since 2019, the state legislature has changed almost everything about how law enforcement is deployed,” she said. “Any bill to hire and pay a special prosecutor specifically focused on criminal charging decisions for peace officers is unnecessary, and its political nature will have an immediate cooling effect on the profession and harm public safety.”
Meanwhile, the state may allocate millions to hiring more cops. A bill — HB 2015 — that would allocate millions in state taxes to hire new police and allow local governments to create new sales taxes for boosting police forces passed the House of Representatives and is sailing through the Senate. The bill stems from Governor Bob Ferguson’s campaign promise to spend $100 million in state money boosting police forces in Washington.
But police accountability advocates — including Spokane’s Debbie Novak, whose son David was killed in 2019 by the Spokane police and who received a $4 million settlement from the city in 2022 — say that’s backwards.
“The frustration for me, and I’m sure for Dawn and other mothers and relatives and sisters here in Spokane, is: You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. [Governor Ferguson’s] gonna get $100 million?” said Novak, a spokesperson for the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability and one of the most vocal supporters of the OIP legislation. “At some point it has to be about us. It has to be about the citizens. It has to be about the impacted families. We’ve been working on this for four years and there’s so much documentation and history that shows what we have does not work.”
(An original bill that Ferguson supported, SB 5060, asked for the full $100 million, but it died in committee. HB 2015 would allocate about $15 million between now and 2031.)
Brionna Aho, a spokesperson for Ferguson, disputed the characterization that the governor supports new cops more than he supports police accountability. Though he specifically highlighted funding for new police in his Inaugural Address, she said Ferguson, as attorney general and now as governor, has always supported police accountability, including the OIP bill that died in committee. A Washington State Standard piece published in January reported Ferguson wanted to place the OIP directly under his office.
“As Attorney General, his office wrote the Use of Force Model Policies for law enforcement, after dozens of meetings with stakeholders and thousands of public comments,” Aho said in an email to RANGE, also noting other accountability initiatives. “We must ensure we have enough well-trained police officers to keep our communities safe, and we must ensure officers are following state law.”
She added that the police funding legislation contains stringent accountability requirements for departments to receive funding from the state, “including use of force reporting and compliance with the state’s model policies.”
The questions Dawn would ask
Meanwhile, Dawn is left with unanswered questions about the details of her brothers death.
According to police reports, on the night of his death, Donald had been on the porch of the trailer house with a dog. The cops had known he’d had a pistol-shaped object that was either a cigarette lighter or a gun. (It was a cigarette lighter.) The conversation between the officers and Donald about his outstanding warrant had not been productive and it was apparent that he was not interested in surrendering. Donald had eventually retreated into the run-down house. The deputies had shot canisters of chemical gas inside — Donald had not come out. Then they’d thrown a flashbang grenade into the house.
The report then says Detective Travis West and deputies Josiah Loos and Samuel Turner had followed Donald inside and had shot several rounds of bullets from a rifle and one from a handgun into the dark. They couldn’t tell if he was incapacitated, so they then sent a police dog into the room where Donald had been. The dog had attacked Donald, ripping gashes into the flesh of his neck and the back of his head, visible in autopsy photographs. After a short time, they’d brought him out on a body board, and firefighters and police had tried to revive him. They couldn’t. They’d put him in the bed of Detective West’s truck and drove him to a Life Flight location not far away.
Since that day, Dawn’s questions have persisted. If she could sit down with Haskell, she would ask him:
- What was the reason you determined the killing justifiable? (Haskell noted his rationale is available through a public records request.)
- Isn’t it a conflict of interest for you to have been at the crime scene for four hours during the investigation? (The crime scene log, which RANGE has seen, shows Haskell was on-scene for four hours as police investigated. Haskell told RANGE he visits crime scenes as a matter of course, but some police accountability activists have said Haskell should have made his decision based on investigative reports by SIIR.)
- What is the total number of police killings you’ve deemed justified?
- Why does Donald’s autopsy report say nothing about wounds visible on his nose and back?
- When will the Sheriff’s Office release the body camera footage to the public?
It’s an urgent project for her. She’s the only person in her family with the wherewithal and drive to look into her brother’s case. But she has clogged arteries in her heart and is scheduled for a surgery in late May. She will either receive a stint or, if her condition is bad enough, a bypass. Given her health, she’s not confident that she’ll be able to continue. But the despair and frustration of trying to grieve and get information from the county at the same time is weighing on Dawn.
“I’m to the point where I don’t care if I make it through the surgery or not, just because of all the bullshit I’ve been dealing with,” she said.
Sandra Rivera contributed research to this article.
