Gun violence in the city seems to wash on by.
When there’s a murder, there’s often a makeshift street memorial for the victim, which disintegrates in the elements until it is eventually swept away by cleaning crews.
If the killing happened in public, on a sidewalk or in a parking lot, people over time go back to using the space as if death never happened there. I’ve seen this take place as soon as the next morning.
There is also often outrage or a community call for change. It can feel as if that washes on by as well. It gets muted by news of the next shooting, and the next, until it’s an echo heard only by a grieving few.
So it’s notable that in Rainier Beach, some folks are trying to interfere, physically, with this cycle of numbness and forgetting.
There’s a petition movement afoot, with about 800 signees currently, calling for a bus stop to be closed and turned into a memorial for two teenagers who were shot and killed there in January.
“Transforming this bus stop into a permanent memorial will serve not only as a tribute … but as a powerful reminder of the aims we must pursue: reducing gun violence and increasing safety within our neighborhood,” the petition reads.
It was started by friends and family of Tyjon Stewart, 18, and Traveiah Houfmuse, 17, two boys who were gunned down at the corner of Rainier Avenue South and South Henderson Street, outside South Shore K-8 school, on Jan. 30.
A 16-year-old was arrested last month and charged in juvenile court with two counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors are trying to shift his case to adult court, a process that could take months.
Meanwhile, the petition group doesn’t want the strong reaction to fade, as it typically does.
“Closing this bus stop where they were waiting and tragedy happened should be the least the city of Seattle can do,” one petition signer wrote. “We have to start somewhere this gun violence needs to end.”
The bus stop was reopened recently by Metro, however. It serves the 106 and 107 lines, and the 9 express route, on a main thoroughfare heading west to the Rainier Beach light rail station.
There’s a makeshift memorial nearby, with two trees draped in white flower garlands and laminated messages to the lost boys.
“You lit up every hallway and court,” reads one.
“RIP brothers,” reads another.
The main considerations for the authorities with this memorial proposal will be logistical and psychological. Would it set a precedent? Would the city be obligated then to also put up markers or plaques after other killings, past or future?
The blocks around Rainier and Henderson have been the scene, unfortunately, of dozens of shootings over the decades. Last year, two men, Ozie Whitfield and Julius Rodriguez, were killed a block south outside a now shuttered hookah lounge. In 2023, Alleyeceeing Allah was killed in the Rainier Beach Safeway parking lot. That was also the year a shooting strafed the Friday night anti-violence event at that spot. That event was started after three 2020 killings.
There’s no outward marker today of any of this violence.
It's like a repetitive process, like, we're getting too used to death, one Rainier Beach High school graduate told KOMO 4 News after the most recent shooting.
Maybe putting up markers would at least signal a protest of this repetitiveness.
On Monday, I was listening to the New York City mayor and police commissioner celebrating how their city had seen the fewest shootings and murders in the first quarter of any year “in recorded history.”
They were right to be happy in one sense, because crime is down. You have to take a win whenever things get better.
But then they recited the stats: 54 murders in the first three months of the year. Nearly 140 shooting incidents citywide that had caused either injury or death.
Would they have been cheering this if instead they had to go out and put up 54 memorials?
No city is going to do this, of course. Seattle has a low murder rate compared with most big cities, yet last year we would have needed 34 plaques to memorialize all the victims. That’s down from 58 the year before, and 69 in 2023.
Visualize how it would feel psychologically, though, if around the city there were 161 new memorial plaques — signposts of extreme acts of violence, just from the past three years.
It would be distressing, wouldn’t it? That’s the point. It would show, physically, the horrifying baseline levels of violence we've come to tolerate.
I doubt Metro will close the Rainier Beach bus stop as a memorial. It’s already been reopened, because it’s needed by the living.
Just the proposing of it, though, is making good trouble. The Rainier Beach group’s request is exposing a truth about Seattle and other American big cities.
Which is that society doesn’t really want to face up to how violent it is. Imagine a memorial marker for every victim — that would obviously be way too much! It would overwhelm the city. It would be too depressing.
What do we do instead? We let it wash on by.
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