A year since prosecutors say he beat Brent Wood to death along E Olive Way behind the Broadway Rite Aid in the middle of an early March night, Alexander Jay remains in legal limbo in King County Jail even though the court says he needs mental health treatment at a state facility to understand what he is charged with and be part of his legal defense.

CHS reported here on the charges against Jay for the March 2022 murder of the 31-year-old Wood on Capitol Hill. Police said Jay was in custody since his arrest for an attack of a woman at Capitol Hill Station when he was identified as the Wood murder suspect. Detectives believe Jay killed Wood the next day after assaulting the woman in a 10-day string of violence that ended with his arrest for the assault. In between, police believe he also attacked a woman at a bus stop, stabbing her multiple times.

Jay has been jailed since on more than $5 million bail.

In September after a mental health evaluation at King County Jail, Jay was found unfit for trial and ordered to be restored to competency through 90 days of treatment from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. His defense, prosecutors, and the court are still waiting.

In January, a motion from the King County Prosecutor’s office asking the court to order DSHS to transfer Jay to its facilities and provide the treatment was was denied in a court ruling based on precedent and a flood of similar cases. Jay’s case is part of a massive backlog for incarcerated people in need of the state’s mental health services that could require federal intervention.

Brent Wood

While the 41-year-old remains in King County Jail without state treatment, court records show DSHS may finally be preparing to transfer him to begin his 90-day treatment. An update from the DSHS admissions coordinator says that transfer is now on track to take place later this month. But the continuance is one of many filed in the case.

Wood was remembered by those who befriended the artist with an “unwavering artistic view of the world around” and “immediate compassion and love for everyone he met,” one friend told CHS.

His killing was one of two murders of young, gay, homeless men on Capitol Hill that month. Jonathan Caradonna was stabbed and killed on a Saturday morning that March on Capitol Hill’s 13th Ave E in a case that has not been solved.

Some of Brent Wood’s art shared with CHS by a friend

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