It was around 8:30 p.m. May 30 when Teyoka Brooks heard from her daughter, Azjanae, for nearly the last time.
The 15-year-old girl texted her mother to say she was going to visit a friend in Bellevue. She texted her mother again about four hours later saying she wanted to come home, with a picture of the interior of an apartment, according to an affidavit by the King County sheriff’s office.
“My baby — she was the life of the family. She was outgoing, she was smart, she had a bright future ahead of her and plans for the future,” Teyoka Brooks said by phone Wednesday. “And she did not deserve what happened to her at all.”
A Shoreline teenager pleaded not guilty Wednesday to allegations that he beat, trafficked and killed Azjanae Brooks, a Bellevue High School freshman who was found dead in June, three days after she vanished from Snoqualmie.
Kamario Washington Onacki, 17, was arraigned in King County Superior Court to charges of first-degree murder with a firearm, first-degree human trafficking and second-degree assault. He is being held in juvenile detention in Seattle in lieu of $5 million bail.
Washington Onacki’s case was moved to adult court, a requirement under state law for cases involving a 16- or 17-year-old charged with murder.
In a Friday court filing, prosecutors accused Washington Onacki of “brutally” beating and assaulting two 15-year-old girls, including Azjanae, with a gun between May and June, when he was 16. He allegedly tried to force Azjanae into sex work, then fatally shot her sometime between May 30 and 31 inside his family’s apartment, according to the record.
Police think Washington Onacki fled to Los Angeles. The 17-year-old’s attorney did not immediately respond Wednesday to inquiries.
When Azjanae did not return home on the morning of May 31, Brooks called her daughter’s friend in Bellevue, who said Azjanae had not visited her, according to the affidavit.
Brooks and her husband searched for Azjanae in Shoreline, where the teen’s smartphone had last shared location data the night before, but they couldn’t find her. They returned to Snoqualmie that night and Brooks said she called her niece, who knew the older brother of a boy with whom Azjanae had become friends.
The boy, Brooks later learned, was Washington Onacki.
The mother, 42, said she called and texted her niece’s friend repeatedly, asking him for help in finding her daughter, but she never received a response. She filed a missing-person report for her daughter with the Snoqualmie Police Department early June 2, about two days after Azjanae vanished, according to the affidavit.
The same day, deputies found a young woman's remains.
The boy's mother called police shortly before 2 a.m. June 2 requesting that deputies respond to her unit inside Polaris Apartments, a complex near Northeast 175th Street and 12th Avenue Northeast. She said she had just returned home after several days away to find her front door unlocked, and she worried someone had broken in, according to the affidavit.
Deputies arrived to find a girl, later identified as Azjanae Brooks, dead inside the apartment, with obvious injuries and a fired 9 mm cartridge near her body. An autopsy revealed she died from a gunshot to her face, records show.
A man who lives just north of the complex told investigators that around 2:30 a.m. May 31, he heard a male voice yelling and threatening to kill someone, and the sound of a person being slapped. He went outside but didn’t see anyone on the street or sidewalk. Shortly before 3 a.m., the man said he heard what sounded like a single gunshot, followed by silence, according to the affidavit.
A King County sheriff’s detective met with Brooks to tell her they had found Azjanae. Another family member told investigators Azjanae had been dating someone named “Trey” for about a year, records show.
The name caught the attention of another King County sheriff’s detective, who was conducting a separate human trafficking and sexual exploitation investigation in early June. The detective had pinpointed a suspect known as “Trey” and “KO,” who lived with his mother at Polaris Apartments, according to the affidavit.
Investigators conducted a search warrant of that suspect’s social media accounts, revealing messages between him and Azjanae, including her agreeing to meet up with him May 30 in Shoreline. The suspect’s messages showed he intended to recruit Azjanae for commercial sex work, telling her she would “make a better life” and leave with money in her pockets, according to the affidavit.
Investigators got another lead June 13, when a Seattle Police Department notified them of a report they’d received that day. A person told Seattle police he heard that a teenage boy named “KO,” who was staying with his former roommate in north Seattle, had shot and killed a teenage girl, records show.
Sheriff’s office detectives interviewed the former roommate who said “KO” had stayed at his apartment that month with a young girl, who eventually ran away. The person said he had surveillance footage of “KO” assaulting the girl inside the apartment multiple times, including with a gun, according to the affidavit.
Detectives reviewed the footage, which showed “KO” assaulting the 15-year-old multiple times between June 9 and 13, including hitting and kicking her in the head, pointing a gun at her, hitting her over the head with a piece of glass and grabbing her by the throat, according to the affidavit.
Investigators identified the girl and interviewed her at the FBI building in Seattle, where they showed her photos of Washington Onacki. She identified him as “Trey.” The sheriff’s office issued a warrant for Washington Onacki’s arrest on criminal charges related to the human trafficking and commercial sexual abuse investigation, records show.
Los Angeles police arrested Washington Onacki on the warrant July 4. Photos taken at the time of his arrest showed healing wounds on the back of his neck and his shoulder, according to the affidavit.
Washington Onacki was extradited July 15 to Seattle, where he showed detectives where he had been stabbed with “a glass shard” on his neck and stomach, as well as a bite mark on his right leg. He told investigators all of the marks were made by the same person, records show.
There’s no question, Brooks said, that those marks were left by Azjanae, who would have done anything to make it back to her family.
“She put up a fight. She fought so hard he had scars and bruises from her fighting, trying to get away,” she said.
Azjanae was known fondly as “Miss Pretty” for her love of doing hair, eyelashes and nails, and she dreamed of one day becoming a lawyer. She was close with her two brothers and three sisters, and was like a “best friend” to her mother, Brooks said.
The Brooks family could not face returning to Washington. They buried Azjanae in Georgia, where the rest of their family lives.
With Azjanae gone, Brooks said she is certain of what justice looks like for her daughter.
“I don’t want him to ever get out, and if he comes up on parole, I want to be the face that he sees every time,” she said. “He should have let my baby come home.”
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
