This morning I drove to the intersection of Howell and Boren, where a homeless man was shot on Monday four times in the chest by a Seattle police officer.
According to police, Officer Ian Burk noticed a man in the crosswalk on Boren holding a board with an open knife in his hand. The 50-year-old homeless man was known as a longtime neighborhood panhandler by business owners and police.
Burk, a 27-year-old, two-year member of the force, hit his emergency lights and left the patrol car. Approximately one minute later, a man lay dead on the sidewalk.
Audio recordings reveal three commands to drop the knife and little else. Police say it is unknown whether the homeless man ever moved toward the officer. Shots were fired from a distance of around nine feet.
Knowing the power of the homeless grapevine, I phoned my friend Ronnie Gilboa at the Urban Rest Stop hygiene center, located a few blocks away from the scene, to see what she knew. Word on the street was that the man was an alcoholic named "Shorty." Footage on the P-I blog shows an unnamed, self-identified "street brother" arriving on the scene to find his friend dead. As the frightened, angry, grief-stricken man struggled to comply with orders to show his hands, three cops took him down.
In what moral universe does a man carrying a piece of wood and a three-inch fishing knife find himself stopped by police and, without any apparent provocation, get shot dead on the spot? A universe in which the lives of the very poor have little to no value.
In Seattle today, to be poor, to have no social status, is to live in fear; to have one's own utter expendability pressed up against one's nose.
I was hoping, this morning, to find some sort of evidence that someone cared. Perhaps a wreath, or a half-pouch of cheap tobacco left for a departed friend. I stood in the pouring rain, staring at the wall. Two frail liatris stems grew from a crack in the ground to about the height of a seated man. Their lovely, delicate, purple blossoms formed into a dull point and looked skyward. That was all.
When I called Ronnie, she mentioned how, the night that Shorty died, someone across the street from the Urban Rest Stop dropped a watermelon from the fifteenth floor of Cosmopolitan Condominiums. They were aiming at a group of homeless people below. The only thing that can be said for them is that they missed. Not funny. Not funny at all. In fact, unspeakably sad. Unspeakably, frighteningly, sad.
Tuesday's police press conference was a pathetic display of carefully managed information and victim blaming. Ranks have closed to protect the murderer within.
Unacceptable.