You don't get shot in the temple during a gun battle. I think they compelled him to kneel down with a knife to his throat and then they executed him.
Neighbors interviewed said that he was away from his house a lot so between that and his job it sounds like they might have needed to go out of their way to break in when he
was there as according to my math it would have been just a fraction of the time. I suppose it's not impossible that it was just dumb luck and their plan was scheduled around Davies's family's camping trip rather than anything about their intended victim and because he was away so much they just assumed that he would be that night, then when they were already mid-plan neither one wanted to back down in front of the other even if they
did realize he was home.
Of course, if I understand correctly whether it was a simple robbery gone wrong or a targeted killing doesn't make any difference in Washington law. What I said before about making a claim of molestation having been the best justification still holds true and
@charminglane suggesting that the emptied safe might have contained video starts my wheels turning on a plausible defense that the victim might have not only sexually abused Gabriel, but had video of it and perhaps was even extorting our "handsome missing angel". I don't personally think that is likely, but artfully crafted it could explain all of the clumsy (even irrational) modus operandi - that Gabriel was trying to get and destroy all the evidence that he had been abused without it ever being known to anyone because he was so ashamed of it.
Of course if he claims he successfully destroyed all evidence then it would only be his own testimony to prove that he was a victim - and it would need to stand against modern technology where very little data (including video) is ever completely destroyed. Forensics will almost certainly recover the data from the broken phone and of course the server-side data will also be intact - call records, contents of sent and received messages etc. Victim and suspects' computers and tablets will be analyzed. Can a convincing argument still be made that someone recorded things on tapes and polaroids and only ever talked about it face to face?
