Mentally Handicapped Friend Of Mine Partially Witnessed A Murder 6 Years Ago And Never Reported It. Can We Still Report It?

Location: Washington State.

I have a buddy who has a learning disability, autism, and just a general sort of slowness to him. He’s a lovely friend of mine. But sometimes he shuts down and doesn’t view things with the same urgency a regular person does. His actions don’t really make sense to me, but this is as he told me.

I asked him what was going on and he explained to me that there’s something he’s never told me.

During the pandemic, my buddy witnessed an elderly woman neighbor get murdered by another tenant of the apartment, a man of maybe 55 years. He slammed her head against the wall, then claimed to police that ‘she had just fallen and he found her.’

My buddy saw the whole incident because he had been coming to check in on her as he’d heard her screaming. He had ended up walking into her apartment at the exact moment of impact. He went into shock and called the police, saying his neighbor had died.

After the old lady’s body was taken away, the man who killed her immediately began to threaten and harass my buddy.

And on top of the harassment, my buddy went into severe mental crisis because of the incident and spent 7 months in the psych ward. When he got out, his apartment had been vacated. And he started couch surfing. It took him several years to get back on his feet.

He only told me about this a few weeks ago because he had kind of a spiral and revealed to me he’d been trying to avoid facing the reality. He feels guilty that he never told the police that he saw that man kill his neighbor.

In my opinion, I feel like since death is forever, it’s never too late for the living to make a change.

But is it too late to report it to the police?