The Auburn Police Department reports that a Seattle man used his cellphone to record an employee of the Muckleshoot Casino using the toilet in an adjoining stall in a restroom at the casino on Dec. 21, 2021.
On Jan. 6, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office formally charged John Matthew Lair, 44, a registered sex offender, with one count of first-degree voyeurism. He has pleaded not guilty.
Here is a summation of what happened, based on the Auburn Police Department’s Certification for Determination of Probable Cause.
On the evening of Dec. 21, 2021, a casino employee later told police, he was using a toilet when a man sitting in the stall next to him, whom he later identified as Lair, dropped his jacket “really hard.”
According to documents, the employee thought that was strange enough, but then he saw a cellphone sticking out of the other man’s jacket pocket under the partition that separated the two stalls, and observed the man reach down to manipulate the cellphone several times to position its camera, as if to record him, and place the jacket to hide the phone.
While that was happening, the employee told police he heard a “ding,” which he understood to mean the other man had started the cellphone’s camera to record him. According to documents, the employee then used his own phone to take a short video of the incident from inside his own stall.
Turns out, this was not Lair’s first go around with voyeurism.
According to court documents, in 2019, Lair was convicted of attempted voyeurism, and on Oct. 12, 2019, he was again arrested, this time at the Port of Seattle and charged with first-degree voyeurism. Charging documents allege Lair had placed his jacket on the ground in a bathroom stall and, as in the present case, used the jacket to partially cover a cellphone that his victim believed was pointed upward toward him, taking photos and videos as he urinated.
That case is still pending in the court system.
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