pt4

We showed one man in crisis on the streets of Seattle. And like so many others, the video of this man was hard to look at. The man fell to the ground and couldn’t get up. He rolled and moaned and crawled and howled. People walked by, the way they always do. They see it all the time.

One online news site tracked the man down after our show aired and gleefully trumpeted, “Man used as proof that ‘Seattle is Dying’ tells his story.”

The writer said that in the documentary, the man is “assumed to be homeless,” oblivious apparently to what millions have understood perfectly well: that Seattle is Dying was never about homelessness. Not for a single minute. It was about narcotics. It was about horrible addiction DISGUISED as homelessness.

The story claimed that the man no longer uses drugs, except for methadone. The man said something about a sciatic nerve problem that could have been giving him problems that day. The article said the man, “struggled to explain why he was sitting on the street that day,” and left it at that.

I’d love to believe all of that, except I know otherwise. In fact the man himself told us otherwise.

That day, on 3rd and Pine, the most notorious stretch of heroin and meth trafficking in the region, the gentleman in question was lurching on the ground and his pants were falling off. The raw tape, much of which wasn’t included in the documentary, shows our KOMO cameraman leaving his camera and approaching the man. He helped him grab hold of a mailbox to pull himself up. And when he was up, the same cameraman reached down and helped the man pull his pants, which were down around his ankles, up over his bare buttocks. The man's phone and wallet had fallen onto the ground, and our cameraman picked them up and gave them back to the man. There was exactly one person on the corner that day who actually helped the man in question. He wore the letters KOMO on his jacket.

And at one point the cameraman said to this man, “Sir, are you high on drugs right now?”

And the man answered, “Yes.”

I wish the man well. I’m glad he has housing. But what happened on that corner was not caused by a sciatic nerve, and Seattle is Dying was not about housing.

Some have wondered accusingly if I took my marching orders from KOMO’s parent company Sinclair.

I smile to myself at that notion for this reason: the idea for Seattle is Dying came from me and me alone. No Sinclair bosses told me to produce the show, in fact we told THEM we were producing the show. The words, the ideas, the concept came from me. There was no interference. Seattle is Dying came from me. From KOMO.

That is the truth.

The take away from Seattle is Dying, though, is something far more profound than petty sniping between media organizations, or a few comments on Twitter.

The take away is that a sleeping giant has been awakened. Regular hard-working people who knew something terrible was happening but couldn’t quite articulate it, have stood up and raised their voices. The messages and the notes and the e-mails have come by the tens of thousands. Parents with kids addicted to heroin have written, and cops and firemen and hospital nurses. Those who are suffering from addiction have written, and those who somehow licked the disease too. Hundreds of people who got fed up and moved away from the city they loved have reached out. Democrats and Republicans alike have said, “Thank you for telling the truth.”

Some of them are angry. All of them are sad.

And, some are apparently oblivious. I understand that the PR agency Pyramid Communications is working to create a "counter-narrative" to the Seattle is Dying documentary. Someone forwarded me one of their e-mails. It included, "today’s toolkit and resources to support coordinated communications in response to KOMO’s 'Seattle is Dying'." And, amazingly, a hashtag, #SeattleForAll.

And, I hear there’s going to be a volley of op-eds coming soon, attacking what we’ve done.

I guess they want to break the mirror instead of addressing the reflection.

I was hoping for action. A re-assessment. An honest look at what we are doing in Seattle, and not doing. Instead we're getting a PR campaign. A "counter-narrative".

In the summer of 2015 I spent a night wandering the streets with my niece Lexi. She had a blue hoodie on and her hair was pulled back. She was skinny and tired looking, but she was still Lexi: funny, smart as a whip, charismatic in the way that she always had been, even as a child.

That night in Pioneer Square she ran into a big, friendly looking guy named Darnell. Darnell's street name was Detox.

Detox gave Lexi a big bearhug and then said, "You heard about Tex, right?"

Lexi said, "No."

"Tex is dead."

"How did that happen?"

"Overdose."

>>6065773

pt 5

The next time I saw Lexi she told me that Detox was dead too. He died of an overdose under a bridge. They found him three days later.

And then that night in the motel room on Aurora, Lexi introduced me to Ritchie. Ritchie was thin, he seemed high, and he wore a baseball cap and had a chain around his neck. He looked me in the eyes and said that sometimes he used narcotics six or seven times a day, depending on how much money he could get his hands on. He also told me that he had an ex-wife and two children.

Ritchie was smart, and he seemed educated. Deep, even.

We talked about heroin and what it felt like to use. He said the stuff was incredibly powerful.

I replied with a question: "Does it feel better than love? Does it feel better than family?"

His eyes were glazed and he shook his head searching for words. "No, it doesn't compare at all. The feeling of heroin is wonderful, don't get me wrong," he said, "but everybody and anybody who knows the feeling of love and the warmth of family knows that there's no comparing to that."

He talked haltingly about the last conversation he'd had with his father, who told him that he was afraid of getting a phone call telling him that Ritchie was dead. As he recounted that phone call Ritchie said, “It absolutely killed me inside." I thought for a moment that he might cry.

The next time I saw Lexi she told me that one week after that discussion in the motel room on Aurora, a week after he talked about love and family and how the drug had stolen it all away, Ritchie died alone in his tent.

Seattle is Dying.

I put that show together for Lexi. And for Ritchie. And Darnell. And Tex. And the man who was screaming silently on the street. And the man who fell down on the corner. And Nick in the alley. And every addicted person who buys their drugs openly on the streets of Seattle and uses them there too, because the cops stop arresting when the prosecutors don’t prosecute and the judges don’t sentence and eventually nobody feels safe or protected anymore. And I put the show together for the people whose lives are reeling out of control with nobody willing to intervene in them because… why? Because we are so compassionate?

I hope to God that all of their wretched souls find some peace. The ones who are still alive, anyway.

Parts 1-3 in last bread… BUILD THE FUCKING WALL