WA assistant AG to decide if a Benton commissioner will be charged
The Washington State Attorney General’s Office will decide whether a Benton County commissioner will be charged in connection with a confrontation in a Kennewick parking lot.
Assistant Attorney General Steve Garvin in the Spokane office has agreed to handle the case for the Benton County Prosecutor’s Office because of the legal conflict of interest, said Benton County Prosecutor Eric Eisinger.
Kennewick police investigated the incident and arrested Commissioner Will McKay last weekend on suspicion of felony theft of another man’s cellphone during a road-rage dispute. McKay took the phone to delete a video the man was taking of him, said court documents.
McKay was released from jail on $1,000 bond the same day.
His case also cannot be heard by a local judge, so a judge from Yakima County will be handling McKay’s case.
The incident happened on Saturday, Oct. 18, when McKay says he saw the driver of a Mini Cooper “driving erratically” and “flipping people off” near the roundabout at the intersection of 27th Avenue and Union Street.
He followed him two miles on Highway 395 to the Gold’s Gym parking lot and pulled into the same lot, said court documents.
The other driver told investigators he started recording McKay on his phone because he didn’t know why he was being followed.
McKay confronted the man about the recording and allegedly grabbed him from behind and stripped the phone away, court documents said. He deleted the video, returned the phone and then drove off before police arrived, said court documents.
Investigators later found McKay, and he said the Mini Cooper driver was the aggressor. He denied “bear hugging” him to get the phone, and said he didn’t know it was wrong to take away the phone just to delete the video.
Earlier this year, Garvin also took over the prosecution of Matthew D. Mason, 32 for a vehicular homicide in Benton County.
Mason is accused of driving drunk on March 1 when he crossed the center line on Highway 224 and collided with an oncoming sedan. The crash killed the sedan’s driver, Antonio Aguirre, 35, of Sunnyside.
Mason is the son of an employee in the Benton County Prosecutor’s Office, so Eisinger asked the state’s attorney general’s office to handle the prosecution.
This story was originally published October 24, 2025 at 3:56 PM.