Prosecutor says Onalaska man, killed, dismembered Auburn man

The King County Prosecutor says Two Dogs Salvatore Fasaga shot 40-year-old Paul John Snarski of Auburn in the face and cut up his body in May 2018, perhaps with a saw.

On Feb. 13, the King County Prosecutor’s Office charged the 40-year-old Onalaska man with first-degree murder, and, because he is a convict, with first-degree illegal possession of a firearm.

Fasaga will be arraigned at 9 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 27 in Courtroom GA of the Regional Justice Center in Kent.

Fasaga is in federal custody on $5 million bond.

Here is what happened, according to the Auburn Police Department’s Certification for Determination of Probable Cause (CDPC).

According to the CDPC, Snarski and Fasaga probably first met in their late teens when they were serving time at the Green Hill School in Centralia, a detention center for youth who’ve been convicted of felony crimes. According to the CDPC, both men went on to violent criminal careers and associated together, off and on, for more than 20 years, Fasaga racking up numerous felony convictions along the way.

According to the CDPC, eyewitnesses told police that on the evening of May 11-May 12, 2018, Fasaga shot Snarski in the face with a .45 caliber, semiautomatic pistol at Fasaga’s home in Onalaska, and Snarski “fell to the floor, bleeding heavily from his head.”

Snarski’s brother reported him missing on May 29, 2018. According to the CDPC, the brother told authorities that Snarski’s family had last seen him at his home in Auburn on May 11. Snarski’s wife confirmed this, according to the CDPC, adding that the family had believed that on that day, Snarski was heading to Oregon to spend Mother’s Day with his mother.

After Snarski’s. disappearance, according to the CDPC, cell tower data picked up the last ping from his cellphone at 2:49 a.m. on May 12, at or near Fasaga’s home in Onalaska, which he shares with his mother.

According to the CDPC, following up on witness statements and what investigators knew at the time, law enforcement personnel served a search warrant on Fasaga’s home in April 2019, and the FBI arrested him that day for unrelated federal weapons charges and placed him in federal custody.

According to the CDPC, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab later processed flooring investigators had removed during their search of the home, and found on flooring from the middle of the living room what testing later confirmed was human blood.

According to the CDPC, when the WSP Crime Lab processed blood from the flooring for DNA, it found Snarski’s.

Witness statements indicate that Fasaga had dismembered Snarski immediately after the murder and directed or recruited others to dispose of the dead man’s remains, his vehicle, and his shoes, according to the CDPC. Snarski’s personal effects and a latex glove with what turned out to be Fasaga’s DNA inside were found in June of 2019 in a wooded area in rural Thurston County, near the I-5 exit where Fasaga’s grandmother lived.

According to the CDPC, witness statements also indicate that one of Fasaga’s associates had driven Snarski’s vehicle from the murder scene, at Fasaga’s direction. The vehicle turned up a month after the alleged murder, abandoned at an apartment complex in Federal Way.

According to the CDPC, an associate of Fasaga’s known as LJ told investigators that Fasaga had brought a large, plastic, truck box-type container to him in Auburn sometime around May 2018, that Fasaga told him that the box contained a “dead dog,” and that he directed or asked LJ to dispose of the container. LJ then took the container to a property in unincorporated King County near Federal Way, where an associate of his was living and dumped it there.

According to the CDPC, witnesses at the Federal Way property, seeing a human arm or leg inside the container, became concerned about “a body” being dumped near their home and contacted LJ to return and retrieve it. According to the CDPC, LJ then transported the container to a remote area of Pierce County with which he was familiar and left it there.

In July 2019, according to the CDPC, detectives, other law enforcement and Search and Rescue personnel, some with cadaver dogs, searched the area LJ had described and found human remains. Anthropologists with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office later determined that the remains consisted of “almost an entire human torso, but a torso only. The person had been decapitated and dismembered by what appears to have been some type of saw.”

When an independent lab processed a sample of one of the bones that had been found for a DNA comparison, it determined the bone was Snarski’s, according to the CDPC.

Court records did not offer a motivation for the murder.