Tom Wales, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle who became a gun-control activist, was killed in his home in 2001. ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX WILLIAMSON, PHOTO COURTESY WALES FOUNDATION

Tom Wales was not supposed to be home on the night of October 11, 2001. Wales, an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, had planned to have dinner and spend the evening with his girlfriend, Marlis DeJongh, a court reporter who lived downtown. But that afternoon Wales called DeJongh and said that he had projects he needed to work on at home. In the evening, after leaving his office, near the federal courthouse, he returned to his Craftsman-style, wood-frame house in a quiet neighborhood known as Queen Anne.

Wales was forty-nine years old and had been a federal prosecutor for eighteen years. When he worked late, which was often, he would tell his family and friends, “I’m here at my post, serving my sovereign.” The phrase was partly a joke, a bit of feigned grandiosity to justify a tendency toward excessive meticulousness: Wales did things slowly. He also had idealistic notions about his work. He took satisfaction in mustering the resources of the federal government to take on criminals, especially those with white collars who abused their privileged status.

On the night of October 11th, Wales arrived home after 7 P.M., gave his twenty-year-old cat, Sam, her nightly arthritis medication, and prepared to install some drywall in a stairwell on the second floor. At about ten o’clock, carrying a glass of wine, he went to the basement office that he had been sharing with his ex-wife, Elizabeth. Tom and Elizabeth had met as high-school students at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and married when Tom was an undergraduate at Harvard. They had a son and a daughter, who at the time were both in Britain, attending graduate school, and they had divorced, amicably, in 2000. (Elizabeth had come out as a lesbian, and the marriage was an inevitable casualty.) Under the terms of the divorce, Tom kept the house, though Elizabeth, a literary agent, ran her business from the basement during the day. Tom used a computer there at night, usually to send e-mails to his children and to DeJongh. That night, he had also planned to work on a fund-raising letter for Washington CeaseFire, the leading gun-control advocacy group in the state, of which he was president.

The Waleses had renovated the house during the years that they lived there, and in the basement they had installed a picture window, which provided a view of the small back yard. At 10:24 P.M., Wales sent an e-mail to DeJongh from the computer, which was on a desk in front of the window. About fifteen minutes later, someone shot him three or four times through the window from the back yard. (Investigators won’t divulge the exact number of shots.) Mary Aylward, an elderly woman who lived next door, heard the shots and called 911. An off-duty police officer, who happened to be nearby, arrived within minutes. Wales appeared to be conscious, but he couldn’t speak, and was taken by ambulance to the trauma center at the Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle.

Friends and colleagues gathered at the hospital, among them Jerry Diskin, the acting U.S. Attorney, who also lived in Queen Anne and had heard the shots; Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s chief of police; Bob Westinghouse, another Assistant U.S. Attorney, and his wife, Kay; and Eric Redman, one of Wales’s closest friends, who had once been married to Elizabeth’s sister. They were told that Wales was in surgery. Just before dawn, a surgeon emerged from the operating room to say that Wales had died. “The doctor obviously had put clean scrubs on to come out and talk to us,” Redman recalled. “She didn’t come out with blood all over her. When I was standing there talking to her, it was hard to look her in the eye. I looked down and saw that the bottom seams of her trousers were covered with blood.”

United States Attorneys are political appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the President. They establish the priorities for each of the nation’s ninety-four judicial districts and announce significant indictments and arrests; many are well known in their communities. Assistant U.S. Attorneys are more like civil servants; they perform the day-to-day work on important investigations and their public speaking is typically limited to the courtroom. They often leave after a few years for better-paying jobs at law firms. Tom Wales was an exception to this pattern.

After graduating from law school, at Hofstra University, Wales took a job with the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. “But Tom always wanted to do something for society, and that kind of life was never for him,” Elizabeth Wales told me. In 1983, he was hired as a federal prosecutor in Seattle. Tom and Elizabeth, a tall, lean, and athletic couple, took to life in the Northwest, going on long hikes in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades. Tom became a neighborhood activist, fighting overdevelopment and the placement of cell-phone towers, and serving for a couple of years on the Seattle Planning Commission.

Tom was fond of local wines and liked to cook—he was especially proud of his fruitcake. But he could also be ornery and competitive. At weekly lunches of the two dozen or so federal prosecutors in Seattle, Wales was a combative presence. “Tom would always eat the same thing, a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich,” Lis Wiehl, who was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle in the nineteen-nineties, recalled. “And everyone would sit around and discuss their cases. Tom and Bob Westinghouse had all the big white-collar cases, and they’d just sit there and scream at each other the whole time. They were good friends, but that was how they related.”

In 1995, a student at the high school that the Waleses’ son attended brought a gun to school and shot and injured two classmates. Tom was horrified. “The idea so outraged him—the idea that a kid could be shot at school—that he decided to get involved,” Elizabeth Wales told me. “It was a good issue for him, because people were passionate about it. People don’t like to handle those kinds of things, but Tom wasn’t afraid.” Wales soon became president of Washington CeaseFire, and in 1997 he led a campaign in favor of a statewide ballot referendum on a proposal to require gun owners to use trigger locks. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Wales was prohibited from running for office and from taking sides in partisan elections, but the law permitted him to campaign on issues to be decided by referendum. Among his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wales’s political activism was considered unusual, but it was also generally accepted.

The proposal brought out the full might of the pro-gun lobby, which spent four million dollars—primarily on television advertisements and direct-mail appeals—and voters rejected the measure, seventy-one to twenty-nine per cent. Nevertheless, the gun initiative established Wales as a public figure in Washington State, and, a few months before he died, he was invited to give the commencement address at a Seattle community college. Wales delivered a manifesto in defense of his liberal politics. “John Lennon said, before he was shot and killed outside the Dakota Apartments in New York, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ ” Wales told the students. “Be engaged; be involved in what goes on around you. Be present in your own life. Find something you believe in passionately and get into it. Get outraged. Take a stand.