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Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes resigned Thursday, days after prosecutors formally charged the 15-year-old suspect in Sunday's mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle food festival, as newly filed court documents revealed a complication that reshapes the case: bullets recovered from the two bystanders killed in the attack do not appear to match the gun the teen was seen firing.

Mayor Katie Wilson confirmed she had accepted Barnes's resignation and named Deputy Chief Andre Sayles as interim chief. Barnes had been out of town in Chicago, where his family lives, attending the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives Conference in Dallas when the shooting broke out Sunday. He faced days of criticism over the department's roughly five-hour delay in holding a press briefing after the shooting, as well as over a confrontational exchange with a reporter Monday who questioned his whereabouts. A police spokesperson said Thursday that Barnes had made four trips to Chicago this year, totaling about 18 days of travel. Barnes attended a vigil for the shooting's victims Wednesday evening before leaving abruptly for a meeting with Wilson, during which he was asked to resign; according to multiple sources, Barnes was initially given the choice to resign or be fired. "Chief Barnes has served this department and this city with dedication, and I am grateful for his service," Wilson said in a statement, adding that the courage and professionalism shown by department officers in the shooting's aftermath deserved to be honored. Barnes, in his own statement, said the city's focus should remain on the investigation, justice for the victims, and healing from what he called a senseless act of gun violence. A group of Black community leaders, including civil rights lawyer James Bible, had met with Wilson earlier Thursday to argue against ousting Barnes, saying he should not be made a scapegoat for the complex challenges of public safety. The Seattle Police Officers Guild criticized Wilson's handling of the matter, with union president Kent Loux saying the city needs "leadership," not "political drama." The city has said it will conduct an after-action review of its emergency response and communication strategy following the shooting.

The King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office charged the teen Wednesday with first-degree assault with a firearm enhancement and second-degree unlawful possession of a handgun by someone under 18. In the statement supporting those charges, investigators said the teen repeatedly fired an untraceable "ghost gun" into the crowd, but preliminary ballistic testing of the bullets recovered from the two bystanders killed showed they did not match that weapon. Shell casings found at the scene indicate four weapons were fired during the shootout, though investigators recovered only three guns in total, meaning two firearms discharged during the gunbattle have not been located. The court filing did not indicate who might have fired the bullets that killed the two bystanders, leaving open the possibility that the fatal shots came from a weapon, or a shooter, still unaccounted for.

A decline hearing was scheduled for Thursday, at which a judge is set to decide whether the case should be transferred out of juvenile court so the teen can be prosecuted as an adult, a process that typically takes several months to resolve even after a judge's initial ruling. The teen remains held in secure detention at Seattle's juvenile detention facility, where he has been since his first court appearance Monday, when a judge found probable cause on three counts of first-degree assault and one count of unlawful firearm possession and ordered him to have no contact with the victims, their families or the Seattle Center campus.

Police have said two people appeared to be shooting at each other outside the Seattle Center Armory around 6 p.m. Sunday as thousands of attendees filled the grounds for one of the city's largest annual festivals, with bystanders caught in the crossfire. Seven people were shot in all. Three died: Carlos Israel Sanchez Villalba, 44, and 19-year-old Junior Cee Niko Semo, both pronounced dead at the scene, and 56-year-old Ashley Whitehead, who died after being transported to Harborview Medical Center. The King County Medical Examiner's Office determined Monday that Semo, initially described as a bystander, had in fact been one of the shooters. Court documents also describe the teen saying "Love you bro" as police escorted him past Semo's body, a detail cited alongside officials' characterization of the two as associates.

Investigators previously said the ghost gun recovered from the teen had an extended 33-round magazine with 19 rounds remaining. They also recovered a Springfield RO 9mm pistol found at the scene but determined not to have been fired, and a Glock .45-caliber pistol modified with an automatic switch and fitted with an extended 40-round magazine, discovered during cleanup efforts the day after the shooting. Of the three recovered weapons, only the ghost gun and the modified Glock are believed to have been fired, meaning the two additional weapons implicated by shell-casing evidence, and any role they played in the two bystander deaths, remain unaccounted for.

Four additional people were wounded beyond the three fatalities, including a 2-year-old boy who was transported to Harborview Medical Center; all surviving victims, including the toddler, have since been discharged. Police are separately seeking to identify an eighth shooting victim who checked himself into a Seattle hospital with a possible gunshot wound but has not come forward to investigators, a gap that has persisted for several days despite detectives' repeated public appeals.

Seattle police continue to describe the shooting as likely gang-related and are reviewing available surveillance footage and interviewing victims and witnesses in an effort to identify who fired the unrecovered weapons, as well as the still-unidentified third suspect believed to have taken part in the gunfight. Sunday's three deaths marked the second, third and fourth homicides recorded in Seattle this month, a city that had recorded its first entirely homicide-free June in more than 50 years just weeks earlier.

That Barnes's ouster came just four days after the shooting, despite public appeals from community leaders to keep him in place, suggests the political pressure over his absence and the department's delayed communication ultimately outweighed arguments about scapegoating a single official for a broader public-safety failure. The sharp division between the police union's defense of Barnes and the mayor's decision to accept his resignation anyway illustrates how differently City Hall and rank-and-file officers assessed where accountability for the response failures should land. Separately, the ballistic mismatch disclosed alongside Wednesday's charges complicates what had initially appeared to be a more straightforward account of the shooting's fatal outcome, raising the possibility that one or both of the bystanders killed were struck by gunfire from a weapon, or a shooter, not yet identified or in custody. That distinction carries real weight for how the case against the 15-year-old proceeds, since the charges filed against him are tied to assault and unlawful firearm possession rather than to either bystander's death directly.

Thursday's decline hearing outcome, along with the identity of whoever fired the fatal shots and the whereabouts of the unidentified third suspect and eighth victim, remain the most pressing open questions in an investigation now well into its fifth day. Interim Chief Sayles's early priorities, and whether Mayor Wilson names a permanent successor in the coming weeks, are also likely to shape how the city's response to the shooting is judged going forward.