♠ In 2010, 17-year-old Jessica Redmon-Beckstead – who was pregnant at the time – was riding the bus with her boyfriend when five black women taunted, attacked, kicked, punched and robbed her.…
One woman yelled, “We didn’t hit her in the stomach!”Her retort got a few laughs – and then the violence resumed.
The attack was caught on video and posted by the Seattle Times. The baby was born healthy.
♠ Fox affiliate, KCPQ, reported a few months before that a disabled man was ”terrorized” on a bus then punched in the face and knocked out.
♠ Just months ago, an Iraq war veteran in a suburb of Seattle was riding a bus when he confronted several black passengers who were using foul language – including the “N” word.
They attacked him. The Marine veteran fought back and drove them off the bus. The incident was captured on video. The shaken suspects were last seen quickly leaving the bus. No arrests were made.
♠ Last summer, aspiring rapper Ondrell Harding beat a man to death in the man’s home. At least five people saw it: the victim’s wife and preteen son and a few of Harding’s friends.
The district attorney did not file charges because he was unable to determine who started the altercation. Four months later, Harding and five of his friends beat up another man at a bus stop. They told police the single victim attacked them. This time, the district attorney filed charges and convicted him. Harding received a three-month sentence.
♠ about 20 black people who participated – or stood by and did nothing – in a beating at the Seattle Metro Bus terminal – all under the gaze of one video camera and three security guards. The recording revealed a lot of kicking and shouting.♠ at least three black men stood outside a Denny’s restaurant in May 2012. While one worked the video and the other narrated, the third broke into the restaurant after he was denied entrance, causing extensive damage in the process.
♠ lesbian community activist and artist Kayla Stone was assaulted by a crowd of black and Hispanic people who taunted her with anti-gay slurs. The following night, they beat her up.
♠ Seattle teenager who last summer was assaulted and tortured for several hours because he was white and his attackers believed the victim’s ancestors were to blame for slavery. KOMO news reported that the victim said : ““They said, ‘This is for what your people did to our people.’ They were like whipping me with my belt, my studded belt,” The victim’s Dad said, “(the attackers) put a gun to the back of his head and told him if he said anything they were going to blow his head off while they sat there and burned him with cigarettes on the back of the neck.”
♠ Earlier this year (a gay, Asian man) Nihan Thai, talked to KING-TV: He was walking home from the light rail station, he recalled: “I was literally ten steps away from the house. And I felt a hit on my right face and another hit on the back of my neck and on my lower back, and so as I was falling forward I felt hands grabbing my jacket and my bag.” Two months later, not far from where Thai was attacked, another man was grabbed from behind, robbed and beaten. His name was Danny Vega, and he died. Before he died, Vega told police “he’d been attacked by three African-American males, all around 18 years of age,” according to the Post-Intelligencer. It was the 10th such attack in that area in two months, all near the corner of Martin Luther King Way and Othello Street.
“Thai started visiting his neighbors, they had a lot to say, and soon he realized he was doing his own crime survey. Thai knocked on 49 doors. Thirty-two people were home. How many of them had been victims of a crime since moving to the neighborhood? All but three. Many victims told Thai they’d never reported the crimes to police. “It happens to them so often that after two or three times they stopped reporting because they didn’t see any progress,” said Thai.
♠ No report of racial violence and lawlessness in Seattle can be considered complete without a mention of the biggest and nastiest bit of racial business in the history of that town. It’s an event that echoes today: the Seattle Mardi Gras Riot of 2001, where, for three-and-half hours, tens of thousands of people watched helplessly, and police stood by quietly as a race riot broke out.
The horrific riot became the subject of a Wikipedia page.