SEATTLE, AP Oct. 12, 2001 — A federal prosecutor who headed a prominent gun control group in his spare time was shot in his home late Thursday and died early today. The prosecutor, Thomas C. Wales, 49, had been shot in the neck and the side late Thursday, a hospital spokeswoman said. Details about the shooting were sketchy. No arrests had been made, a police spokesman, Mark Jamieson, said. A neighbor, Emily Holt, said she heard the shots on Thursday night and saw a man walking away. "He wasn't running, just walking real fast," Ms. Holt said. She said he got into a car parked about a block away under a tree and a streetlight. Mr. Wales was a member of the fraud unit in the United States attorney's office here, specializing in prosecution of banking and business crime. A spokesman for the office, Lawrence Lincoln, said he had been a prosecutor since 1983.

Mr. Wales was president of the board of Washington Ceasefire, a gun control group in Seattle that sponsored a failed initiative in 1997 that would have would have required handgun owners to undergo safety training and use trigger locks on their weapons. The National Rifle Association mounted a $2 million campaign against Initiative 676, which had the support of Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and other prominent residents of the state. "We don't know who killed Tom, or why, but we know that our community has lost a kind, compassionate man," said Ceasefire's executive director, Bruce Gryniewski. Federal agencies were helping the Seattle police in the investigation. Mr. Wales's former wife, Elizabeth, a former Seattle School Board member, was in Europe with the couple's adult son and daughter, The Seattle Times reported, quoting federal sources. The couple divorced a few years ago but were on friendly terms, neighbors said.