Smuler on the Seattle community on Wednesday’s deaths
I avoided digging to deeply into the news of the shooting in Seattle this past Wednesday. Part of this is a habit of mine, I never dig too deeply into anything upon first glance. Whatever happens communities continue to evolve, the world does not end, the planets still continue in their orbits, and time marches forward. This is the nature of things. It always has been and it always will be.
I’ve been quite mindful of the fact that there is no such thing as a true story. What I find relevant, salient, and revealing about an event is different than what another person finds about that event.
The shootings this past week in Seattle got personal today. They were mentioned during my church’s service. I saw people who I know lost friends this week, standing on the chancel, welcoming their newborn child into our church community. Later in the day I learned that, a member of a small group I belong to, lets call her Torri, is friends with the lady who made the
911 call reporting the shooting at 8th and Seneca. The caller is now traumatized. Torri has had a horrible week as a result of supporting her friend and other issues.
I also listened to the 911 Call from Cafe Racer, the location of the initial shooting.
I got a ride from another friend between church and a party. She was attempting to pin the root cause of this past week on one simple issue, our country’s lack of gun control. The issues that have been dragged to the surface are much more complex and nuanced than can be compressed into that simple analysis.
I will not be as presumptuous as to claim that I know the story and root cause of what happened. That being said I have collected quotes and information that I found relevant here. I found doing this to be reminiscent of my response to September 11th, 2001. I spent that evening writing down facts, figures, and scraps of info that I felt were important as I watched the TV news. I no longer watch TV news for many reasons, but I have collected Smuler, scraps from my readings that illuminate the themes that I believe are part of the root cause of this past week’s events.
“I ran up to her right away and there was just a massive pool of blood there,” said Yori, 58, who helped along with other bystanders. “I didn’t know anything about her, so I spoke to her as a human being who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The Navy veteran said he gave her last rites.
“I felt really special to be able to do that – for us to be there when nobody else was there with her,” said Yori, 58.
A police supervisor who recognized Yori told him to leave, not knowing he was trying to help. Another officer who also recognized Yori next to the victim asked him to keep onlookers away from the crime scene, which he did. He also stayed to give officers a statement.
After giving Leonidas last rites, Yori went to his church, Seattle First Presbyterian on Eighth Avenue, and prayed for her. Later that night, he went to sleep as he usually does in the church’s doorway.
Told Thursday she had two young children, Yori’s striking blue eyes welled with tears.
“I got to thinking, what would it be like to come home expecting your wife to be there, expecting your mom to be there and all of a sudden, she’d been shot.
“That reaction, you feel so helpless. Absolutely helpless.”
“If you look back over the shootings we’ve had this year and the prior year, you can see many of them are related to the belief that it’s O.K. to carry a gun somewhere to solve a dispute,” Mayor Mike McGinn said at a news conference on Thursday. “We have to look at what we can do to redouble our efforts in this regard.”
Even in the best of times, the police in Seattle, a generally low-crime city, live under something of a bell jar of scrutiny. Widespread libertarian sentiments about personal liberty — and a small but vocal anarchist community ready on short notice to throw epithets, or sometimes rocks, at the police — often bump up against expectations of personal safety.
The police are also tested by an average of 100 to 300 political demonstrations a year.
Police officials said that efforts used in some other cities to get guns off the street — notably the New York’s Police Department’s “stop, question and frisk” program, which gives the police latitude to stop people officers think might be carrying a weapon or other contraband — would simply not be accepted here, despite a record of success as measured in seized weapons.
“Our community has probably a lower tolerance than New York City does for police intervention,” Mike Sanford, an assistant chief at the Patrol Operations Bureau, said in an interview at police headquarters. But with the recent shootings, he said, there are now genuine safety issues in some neighborhoods, and people are reaching out to the police seeking reassurance and a greater presence.
Dale Todd, 55, who was riding his bicycle on Wednesday around the cordoned-off crime scene near the university. At one point, he stopped in front of an officer manning an intersection blocked with yellow caution tape.
“I’m behind you guys,” Mr. Todd said.
“Tell the mayor,” the officer responded.
Stawicki’s bloody spree — five killed (and one injured), including a second shooting on First Hill as he was on the run — didn’t end until nearly five hours later when, confronted by police in West Seattle, he dropped to his knees and shot himself in the head.
Walter Stawicki, 65, believes that his son grew more and more lucid in the hours following the shootings, realizing what he had done, and killed himself to take responsibility.
Walter Stawicki said that his son was “a gentleman,” but regrets he didn’t act to have his son committed for mental-health care.
Ian Stawicki showed signs of autism and had learning disorders. He struggled to read, write and focus his attention, his father said.
But the two men distanced themselves as they learned more about Stawicki’s strange and potentially dangerous behavior. Cafe Racer owner Kurt Geissel saw it too, as did other nearby businesses.
“Everybody has their own personality and their own quirks and we don’t try to fault people for who they are,” Geissel said. “Everyone has a bad day. But he was consistently not all there.”
Now, Walter Stawicki regrets he didn’t force a mental-health intervention, even if it meant lying to say his son posed an imminent risk.
“We let him down and we let a lot of other people down, too, by not effectively being able to intervene,” Walter Stawicki said.
“I’m grieving for him, I’m grieving for his mother, I’m grieving for his brother. I’m grieving for six other families.”
Victims of the Cafe Racer shootings will be honored at a gathering outside the cafe Saturday afternoon and at a benefit concert Sunday evening — and the cafe’s owner says he has decided he will reopen the business, but he does not know when.
“I think Joe and Drew and Kim and Don would be mad if we didn’t,” said Kurt Geissel, who has owned the cafe for eight years.
Geissel was referring to the four people fatally shot in the cafe Wednesday: Joe Albanese, Drew Keriakedes, Kimberly Layfield and Donald Largen.
According to Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel, detectives are examining three primary possibilities: Stawicki may have used his mother’s truck, gotten a ride from someone or hopped on a bus.
He better have taken public transit, used zipcar, hitchhiked in a prius/leaf or bicycled.
Using his mother’s truck as a Single Occupant is unforgivable.
This is Seattle after all, and just because you’re a mass murderer, there’s no excuse to not do what the NWO order tells you to do.