It took just mere moments. Nothing more than two taut and terrifying minutes for a nearly four-hour shooting spree on Eagle Harbor to come to a fatal conclusion.
Witnesses who saw the horrifying finish to the Saturday night showdown just south of downtown Winslow — where a gunman aboard a wooden sailboat anchored just outside the Harbor Marina fired a high-caliber rifle randomly at the shore and homes along the water and kept police at bay for three hours — looked like it would be resolved peacefully.
The gunman, later identified as Robert David Yeiser, 34, of Seattle, was finally starting to obey police commands as two police boats filled with SWAT team members approached the boat, witnesses told the Review.
It was just before 1 a.m. Sunday.
Guardian One, the helicopter from the King County Sheriff’s Office, had been circling the boat off-and-on for more than an hour, soaking the 55-foot sailboat Flying Gull in a strong white spotlight as Yeiser paced on the deck of the boat.
Police shouted orders through a bullhorn, and Yeiser finally put his rifle down.
He put his hands up.
He’d nearly surrendered, and it looked like he would, as Yeiser climbed into a dinghy off the Flying Gull as the two police boats filled with SWAT officers trained their weapons on him.
They asked him to untie the dinghy from the sailboat, but suddenly, Yeiser had something else in mind.
A beautiful evening
“It just seemed like a crazy movie,” said Lisa Skelton.
Skelton was sitting on the deck of her condo near the Harbor Marina when it all started Saturday, not long before 8:30 p.m. There were loud pops coming from the water.
“We just thought it was random fireworks,” she recalled, and a neighbor came over and told them someone was shooting from a sailboat.
It was a sailboat that had been in the harbor for a couple of weeks, a 55-foot ketch with two masts, but one they never saw anybody aboard.
“Sure enough, there was this guy, he had this rifle and was shooting over to the Eagledale side,” Skelton said.
“He would go down in his boat, load up and come back out and shoot,” she said.
Sometimes he would fire at the south shore, then west, and other times, toward the southeast side off the stern of his boat. Skelton said she never saw him aim his rifle north, to her side of the harbor.
Skelton said she could hear the man on the sailboat talking incoherently and rambling before he would burst into shouts.
He’d pass from pacing, to screaming, to shooting.
“At one point he said, ‘I own you.’
“‘I own you cops, come and get me.’
The gunman would fire about 10 shots at a time, she said, then march military-style around the boat and then go below deck to reload.
“When he was walking around he was holding his gun like a cadet would hold it,” Skelton said, with the butt of the rifle in his palm and the barrel of the gun pointed straight up.
He kept marching back and forth, from bow to stern, with his free arm swinging back and forth with his paces.
Warning goes out
The first warning for many on Bainbridge was the electronic alert that city officials issued that warned islanders to avoid the shoreline along Eagle Harbor because of an “active shooter.”
The city issued the advisory just before 9:30 p.m. The notice said: “Avoid all shoreline near Eagle Harbor. Active shooter event in progress.”
Multiple 911 calls had come in to emergency dispatchers in the moments after the man began shooting, with some callers noting the sound of gunfire appeared to be coming from different types of weapons. One caller claimed the man had a rifle and a magazine that would hold 30 rounds of ammunition.
Another, said Bainbridge Island Police Chief Matthew Hamner, warned that Yeiser was armed with multiple weapons.
Hamner was not on the island at the time the incident began. He was chaperoning a church dance in Port Orchard when he got the call about a shooter in the harbor from Sgt. Ben Sias.
Sias and Officer Cam Lewis were the only two Bainbridge officers patrolling at the time; the island’s third officer on duty was on the way back from a drop-off at the Kitsap County Jail.
Sias and Lewis were hunkered down on the north side of the harbor, he told the chief, and could hear rounds whizzing past and bouncing off the water.
There was a quick moment of disbelief, Hamner said, as he listed to Sias explain what was happening.
“They heard bullets going through the limbs and leaves of the trees,” he said.
Sias and Lewis were taking cover behind a metal CONEX shipping container on the north side of the harbor.
“While I’m on the phone with him, he’s getting shot at again.
“I was incredulous. I was like, ‘Where are you, Afghanistan? You’re not getting shot at on Bainbridge Island!’”
Massive response
The numbers began to change quickly, however.
The sound of sirens of police units arriving from off island streamed south along Highway 305.
Multiple police agencies responded to the scene, including officers from the Poulsbo, Bremerton and Port Orchard police departments, the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, the Washington State Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The shooter’s vessel was near the middle of the harbor, at anchor.
Gunshots continued, but for most folks along Eagle Harbor, they were quickly dismissed as the last blasts of leftover Fourth of July fireworks.
Authorities tried to clear the shoreline as the gunshots continued. One video posted to a Seattle television station showed the disconcerting scene, with oblivious paddleboarders enjoying the north side of the harbor as gunshots rang out with the Flying Gull in the background.
The first priority became getting people away from the shoreline, and keeping other boats away from the shooter on the sailboat.
The Bainbridge-Seattle ferry route was ordered shut down by the Coast Guard’s Captain of the Port in Seattle.
Two full-round sailings were canceled; the 9:45 p.m. run from Bainbridge, and the 10:40 p.m. from Seattle.
One of the ferries was loaded at the dock at the time of the stoppage of service, said ferry spokesman Ian Sterling. Those people just stayed aboard and waited until the boat could sail again, he said.
The Coast Guard sent its 45-foot response boat from Seattle to Bainbridge to help keep other boaters away from the gunfire in Eagle Harbor, and the vessel was used to “enforce a safety zone, making sure no one else entered that area during the incident,” said Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Levi Read.
Police along the shore, however, held their fire as Yeiser continued to pepper the shoreline with random shots.
At a command post set up at Washington State Ferries’s shipyard, just to the east of the sailboat on Eagle Harbor, police came up with plans on how to contact the shooter and their other next steps.
Standoff continues
The sporadic gunfire set off a flurry of tweets and messages on social media, most expressing shock and surprise.
One islander, on the Bainbridge Island Fire Department’s Facebook page, posted this: “We see everything and no police or Sheriff yet. He keeps loading and shooting. This has been going on for an hour. Where is the response.”
The post was made just before 10 p.m.
Said another poster, on Facebook: “Im on my boat at Eagle Harbor Marina and just heard 6 shots and a “[expletive] you cops.”
Some on social media said they initially thought the noise was fireworks.
Wrote one boater: “We docked our boat just before this started — went right past him. YIKES.”
Just about an hour after its first warning, at nearly 10:30 p.m., the city put out another warning to residents along the shore: “Shelter in place” and avoid standing near windows.
Stranger on the water
Yeiser wasn’t one of the familiar liveaboards in Eagle Harbor, or a regular and recognizable visitor.
He was relatively new to the Northwest, as well, and had previously been working at Amazon in Seattle since June 2012, according to his profile on LinkedIn, a business-based social networking website.
He was a former editor in the online retailer’s web services division, according to his LinkedIn profile, and started work as a senior content developer and was with the company through June 2016.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Review.
Yeiser was a new transplant to the Seattle area, having attended the University of North Dakota through May 2012. (He is not listed in the university’s alumni database, a UND official said Monday.)
Yeiser has owned the Flying Gull since at least 2004, according to Coast Guard records, with the vessel’s registered home port as Seattle.
His life had taken some troubled turns in recent months, however.
Records in King County Superior Court show that Yeiser was the focus of two lawsuits last year from Commercial Marine Construction Company over unpaid bills.
A judgment in one of the two cases, from August 2016, ordered Yeiser to pay $10,258 and attorney fees and costs to the owner of the slip where his boat had been moored.
In an earlier case, Commercial Marine Construction Company filed a lawsuit against Yeiser in July 2016 to have him vacate his rental moorage slip just east of the Aurora Bridge on Seattle’s Lake Union.
The company had terminated its lease agreement with Yeiser two months earlier, but said Yeiser had ignored a 20-day notice to vacate and was continuing to live in his sailboat at the dock.
Yeiser had been leasing a moorage spot there on Lake Union since June 2013.
Yeiser, who reportedly had been working at Amazon at the time, was paying monthly moorage fees of $635 a month, plus liveaboard and utility fees.
His landlord said Yeiser owed $866 in fees through May, plus moorage for a part of June, at the time of his eviction.
According to court documents in that case, however, Yeiser alleged in an email to the company that he was being overcharged.
He also said he wanted Commercial Marine Construction Company to pay him $8,000 for damages to his boat motor and the theft of his dingy.
That email was sent to the company three days after his landlord gave notice that it was canceling his lease.
In a letter to Yeiser, an attorney for Commercial Marine Construction Company disputed the accusation that Yeiser was being overcharged for moorage.
“While the theft of your dingy and damage to your motor is unfortunate, we are not responsible for either loss. The allegation that you have been overcharged is baseless and without merit,” the attorney said in the May 20, 2016 letter.
In court papers, Commercial Marine Construction Company said Yeiser owed the company a total of $3,615 in back rent, utility and late charges, and the firm also sought $6,643 in legal fees.
The marina’s legal team also researched ways to have Commercial Marine Construction Company remove the vessel from the dock as an “abandoned or derelict vessel,” according to legal invoices from the company’s attorney, and to find out if the state Department of Natural Resources could assist in funding to have the Flying Gull removed from its moorage spot as a derelict vessel.
Through the lens
Dinah Satterwhite said she didn’t hear gunshots ringing out across the harbor.
Instead, a friend contacted her — first by text, then a phone call — just after 10 p.m.
The family turned off the lights to their home, 15 feet from the water, and Satterwhite said she called 911 to see if there really was a shooter.
The dispatcher told them it appeared the shooter was only about a half block away. They were told not to leave their home.
“They called us back in 10 minutes and said the shooter is closer to you than we imagined.
“We didn’t know how close was close,” she added.
They searched the water with binoculars, but didn’t see anything at first, she said.
When a circling police helicopter put a searchlight on the boat, it lit up the whole vessel. Satterwhite said she saw the gunman take a shot at the helicopter, and the smoke from the rifle chase the spotlight into the sky.
Satterwhite, a professional photographer, continued watching through the zoom lens of one of her cameras as the helicopter circled again and again.
Across the harbor
Arthur Lynch said his wife got a text from a neighbor about the shooter and the “shelter in place” warning.
“At first, it was ‘What the heck?’” he said, recalling his wife had thought she heard fireworks earlier.
They saw the helicopter circle and put a light on the boat, and also when police used flash grenades.
His son called from Colman Dock in Seattle, left stranded by the shutdown of the ferries.
Lynch said he was surprised to see Gabriel, 24, make it home to their place on the south side of Eagle Harbor before the standoff came to its tragic close. Ferry sailings to Bainbridge had restarted with the 11:15 p.m. from Seattle.
They kept watching the sailboat in the harbor as Guardian One hovered over the harbor.
Lynch said the man could be seen quite clearly in the police spotlight, walking around the deck completely naked.
The approaching police boats, described by some as two Zodiacs, were barely visible, not far outside the spotlight. Several SWAT team members were at the front of each, weapons at the ready.
The gunman came and put his arms up, waving them a bit, he said.
“We thought he was going to lay down in the boat but then he turned around. I was like, ‘Don’t do it, buddy, don’t do it,’” Lynch said, worried about what was going to happen next.
But Yeiser climbed back aboard, over the transom and into the boat again, disappearing from view.
Lynch said he thought Yeiser had gone below, but his son was watching from a different vantage point, and saw him come back out with the rifle and point it at the SWAT team waiting nearby.
“And then it was, bang, bang, bang and it was, ‘Oh, my god, they shot him.’”
Witnesses said the SWAT team quickly swarmed aboard the boat. One said it looked like they were trying to give medical aid, and Yeiser was loaded aboard one of the police boats and taken back to the WSF shipyard, where paramedics were waiting.
Those who watched the standoff come to its ghastly end praised the police response as patient and professional.
Skelton, a north shore resident, said police warnings to the gunman were made time and time again.
And at the end, it looked like those words were being heard.
Over a megaphone, police asked for him to come out with his hands up.
He did, Skelton said.
“They asked him to get in his dinghy; he did.”
But when police asked him to untie the dinghy, “That’s when he turned around and crawled back into his boat.”
“That’s when he turned back around, to crawl back off the boat and get his gun.”
Moments later, he stood up with his gun and pointed it at officers.
“Then we heard ‘Pop! Pop! Pop!’ and then that was the end of it,” she said.
How many shots, exactly? Witness recollections varied.
For Lynch, he thought he heard five shots. His wife, three.
Regardless, for some it seemed there would be no other outcome but an ill-fated ending to the standoff.
“The police did what they had to so. What can you say? You feel bad that it happened,” Lynch said.
Hamner, Bainbridge’s police chief, gave few details of those last moments, citing the investigation now underway of the police shooting by the Washington State Patrol’s Criminal Investigative Division.
Police expected the standoff to end peacefully right up until the end, Hamner said.
“We thought he was going to go and he picked up a rifle and pointed it at officers,” Hamner said.
