A Seattle restaurant and its owner have filed a federal lawsuit against the city for their expenses and loss of business during the 2020 Capitol Hill Organized Protest, the latest in litigation that has already cost the city more than $9 million.
The lawsuit claims that officials' efforts to accommodate thousands of demonstrators who flocked to Capitol Hill during the Black Lives Matter protests that summer cost Peter Pak — owner of Oma Bap, a Korean restaurant at 11th Avenue and Olive Way — tens of thousands of dollars in business and other damages.
The city set up a long line of portable toilets and dumpsters for protesters at that intersection, turning the corner "into the epicenter of its public-sanitation support of CHOP," the lawsuit says.
As a result, protesters "were continually dumping garbage and human waste outside Oma Bap, and making the area unsightly, unsanitary, unsafe and treacherous to navigate," according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
The lawsuit alleges the restaurant sustained thousands of dollars in damage from vandalism, which it claims continued for months after the CHOP zone was dismantled because the city continued to tolerate and encourage a "tent city" that sprung up during the protests at Cal Anderson Park, across the street from Oma Bap.
The lawsuit alleges the restaurant boarded up its windows for months — from September 2020 through February 2021 — after they were repeatedly broken.
Pak and his restaurant are represented by the same attorneys who in February negotiated a $3.6 million settlement with the city on behalf of a dozen Capitol Hill businesses, led by Hunters Capital, over similar claims. That figure included a $600,000 award of attorneys fees after a federal judge sanctioned the city for destroying evidence: tens of thousands of deleted text messages between then-Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best and other high-ranking city officials.
Figures provided by the city attorney's office show the city paid more than $6.2 million to Seattle law firm Harrigan Leyh Farmer & Thomsen to defend that lawsuit. The office didn't immediately respond to requests for comment about the new litigation.
The CHOP came into being when the Seattle Police Department abandoned its East Precinct on Capitol Hill after it became the focus of almost nightly demonstrations involving thousands of protesters outraged over the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Those protests sometimes turned violent, and officers were pelted with bottles, fireworks and rocks.
The city tried to accommodate the throngs of demonstrators and used barriers that had been protecting the police station to reroute and block traffic, giving over Cal Anderson Park to the crowds. The lawsuit claims those barriers, and other city support for CHOP participants, had an "immense" and negative impact on Oma Bap's business.
Likewise, the violence that erupted inside the protest zone drove customers away and endangered the restaurant's employees, including a manager who quit because he feared coming to work, the lawsuit claims.
The city "adopted a policy supporting the CHOP occupation, acting with deliberate indifference toward those suffering harm from it," the lawsuit says.
Seattle officials had evidence CHOP was negatively affecting businesses and residents but did nothing to intervene, the lawsuit claims.
"Rather than seeking to restore order and protect the residents and property owners within CHOP, the city instead chose to actively endorse, enable, and participate in the occupation of CHOP," the lawsuit alleges.
In addition to the $3.6 million settlement reached this winter and the more than $6.2 million in associated defense fees and costs, the city last year paid $500,000 to the father of 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson, who bled to death after he was shot inside the CHOP zone and police and firefighters refused to respond to the scene.
Anderson was taken to a hospital in the back of a pickup.
