The gunman killed by police last summer on his sailboat in Eagle Harbor was shot seven times, according to a Washington State Patrol investigation into the shooting.
Robert D. Yeiser, 34, died at the end of a four-hour standoff in Eagle Harbor on the evening of July 8. Yeiser was shot by a police SWAT team as he stood on the deck of his sailboat, the Flying Gull, at the close of a confrontation that began when Yeiser started firing a rifle at random at the shoreline and homes around the harbor.
In the Washington State Patrol’s report of the shooting, authorities said Yeiser had been talking about killing himself for more than six months before the standoff in Eagle Harbor, and a friend told police he found Yeiser “completely drunk and in the midst of a breakdown” when he visited earlier in the day.
The friend also told police Yeiser drank two bottles of wine, then started on a bottle of whiskey, and had also been smoking marijuana, on the day of the shooting.
“It really went downhill from there,” the friend told police, adding that Yeiser began to complain about being abused as a child, and then threatened to kill his parents.
The investigative report from Washington State Patrol on the officer-involved shooting, which was finished on April 3 and released this week to the Bainbridge Review under the state’s open records law, offers new details on Yeiser’s violent end in Eagle Harbor last summer.
Authorities said earlier they had tried for hours to get Yeiser to surrender peacefully and step off his sailboat, but Yeiser was shot multiple times after he aimed a rifle at SWAT officers in the boats pulling up next to his sailboat.
Yeiser’s friend, who had known him for five years, told police he had tried to get Yeiser to pull himself together when he met him on the day of the shooting. He said he tried to take Yeiser crabbing, but Yeiser started yelling at him and at passing boats so the excursion was called off. Back on his friend’s boat, the pair got into an argument after Yeiser kicked his friend’s dog off a couch.
Yeiser came back a half hour later “and began an ‘apologetic rant’ about how when people die their evil spirits turn to dust and everyone absorbs the dust. Bob [Yeiser] explained that [the friend’s] dog had absorbed a lot of the dust and Bob could feel it coming off the dog so he kicked it to get the evil spirits away.”
After Yeiser left his friend’s boat, the friend moved his boat to a different part of Eagle Harbor.
The friend told a detective that the shooting started soon after, and he could see Yeiser on his sailboat, shooting toward the houses on the shore, according to the WSP report.
Kitsap County 911 operators started getting calls of gunshots from a boat in Eagle Harbor at 8:32 p.m. July 8, the end of an 80-degree sunny and clear day on the island.
People on paddle boards and kayakers were paddling just a few hundred yards from the Flying Gull, while others in sailboats and other vessels nearby were enjoying their after-dinner hours until they heard screaming, cursing and what sound like fireworks from a wooden ketch anchored in the harbor.
Investigators, reviewing a video taken by a person in a nearby sailboat as Yeiser was shooting toward the shore, said they could see on the video where bullets were kicking up splashes of water not far from the people on paddle boards.
The WSP report does not indicate how many officers may have struck Yeiser in the quick flurry of gunshots after Yeiser pointed a Ruger 10/22 .22-caliber rifle at officers.
The report does say that five officers on Marine 1, the Kitsap County Sheriff’s boat, opened fire on Yeiser after he came out of the Flying Gull’s cabin with a rifle and aimed it at the SWAT team.
Investigators also determined that none of the officers aboard Marine 8, the Bainbridge Island police boat that was next to Marine 1 at the time of the shooting, fired their weapons during the confrontation.
None of those officers, all deputies with the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, did not provide statements on the shooting to investigators.
Detectives could not determine how many shots were fired at Yeiser from Marine 1, according to the WSP report.
Three officers aboard the Valkyrie III, a 44-foot cabin cruiser that was docked near the Flying Gull, also fired a total of four rounds at Yeiser. The officers, one each from the Bremerton, Bainbridge and Kitsap County departments, all had rifles trained on the sailboat as the SWAT team approached.
Only one of those three officers, a SWAT team member from Bremerton, provided a statement to investigators. “I truly felt he would kill or harm innocent people,” he said in a written statement.
Police found four rifles, multiple ammunition magazines and hundreds of cartridges on the Flying Gull in a subsequent search.
The WSP report notes that those closest to Yeiser said he had been “going crazy for a while” after he’d been evicted from a marina on Lake Washington in November 2016.
That unwelcome move — one fought by Yeiser with erratic messages to his leaseholder — was followed by messages home, to his father, that became increasingly worrisome.
One message retrieved by the WSP, from his dad, said: “We were shocked at the things you wrote. The dislike and anger toward us and all we hold dear caught us off guard.”
Yeiser started making suicidal threats in the next month, December 2016.
The WSP investigation report recounts what Yeiser was telling a friend: “Maybe I should kill myself” and “No one is going to buy my boat. Maybe I should just end it.”
Many of those with views of the harbor said the Flying Gull hadn’t been in Eagle Harbor for long, and most said they hadn’t seen much activity aboard the vessel until the night of the shooting spree.
Emergency dispatchers started getting reports of a man shooting from a sailboat in Eagle Harbor just after 8:30 p.m.
It wasn’t until nearly an hour later that a SWAT team was called out, and the standoff came to its end early Sunday morning on July 9, with King County’s Guardian 1 helicopter hovering above, shining a spotlight onto the deck of the Flying Gull.
Yeiser shot indiscriminately at the shoreline, and witnesses said they heard him shout he wanted to “kill Catholics” and he yelled about the “one percent” and the wealthy while he was shooting.
“[Expletive] all these rich people taking the beach from everybody like they have the right to do it,” one officer recounted Yeiser as saying.
Yeiser was also heard yelling, “Where are the police? Why hasn’t anyone called the police? Send the Coast Guard. Send SPD. Send BIPD. I win every time. I own the police.”
Police tried for hours to get him to surrender.
Previous attempts to get Yeiser’s attention — flash-bang explosives dropped onto the boat — did not get him to come to the deck to talk to a police negotiator. Police tried to call him on his cell phone, but were told that Yeiser had smashed it earlier and thrown it into the water.
Then, about a half hour past midnight, a SWAT officer on Marine 1 knocked out a cabin window on the Flying Gull, and got a canister of tear gas inside.
Minutes passed. Then Yeiser came out covered in a sleeping bag and stood on the deck facing police.
He dropped the blanket and stood naked, and officers ordered him into one of the Zodiak-style rafts tied on the back of the Flying Gull.
Yeiser then got into the middle one and sat down.
The strategy mapped out earlier at the ferry shipyard command post was going just as planned, and it looked — in that instant — that Yeiser would follow their directions to untie the raft and they’d bring him in.
But, as he reached for the line, he pulled himself back up onto the Flying Gull and disappeared into the tear gas that was still fogging the deck.
Police knew there were guns, more than one, inside the vessel. The skippers of the two police boats hovering near the side of the Flying Gull quickly put their engines in reverse, looking to put some space between officers and the ketch, before Yeiser might come back out with a gun.
He did.
When he came back out of the cabin, Yeiser had a rifle in his hand.
One witness said he aimed it upward, then leveled it at SWAT officers in Marine 1.
Most witness accounts describe a short burst of gunfire.
It came from two directions: Marine 1, and the three of the officers perched on the nearby Valkyrie III.
Witness reports, and video from Guardian 1, indicate that Yeiser’s rifle fired, the shot going into the air, as he fell to the deck of the Flying Gull, mortally wounded.
SWAT team members boarded the vessel a few minutes later; with them was a SWAT medic who started medical aid. A helicopter life flight was put on notice and Yeiser was put on a backboard, loaded onto Marine 1, and taken to a waiting ambulance at the ferry shipyard.
He died there, in the ambulance, according to the WSP report.
Robert D. Yeiser aims a rifle at SWAT officers from the deck of his sailboat, the Flying Gull, seconds before the end of the deadly standoff last summer in Eagle Harbor. (Image courtesy of WSP)
