THE PUBLIC FINALLY PANICKED the Sunday before Memorial Day. By then the bodies had been showing up for months—in irrigation ditches, at a porn shop, slumped in the trunks of cars. Gunfire had crackled in supermarket parking lots, at gas stations, inside restaurants. But something about that May afternoon on Pleasant Avenue gripped Yakima residents with fear. Later, people would say it was because the murder went down in broad daylight. Or because it was a holiday weekend. Those closest to the case, though, will tell you that it was in the way 18-year-old Daniel Rivera begged for his life.
Six young men had marched toward the Rivera family home, a yellow house framed by two towering birch trees. They wore white T-shirts and blue baseball caps—the colors of Sureños, the Mexican American gang known for its violent methods. They found Daniel in front of the house and surrounded him. He bolted but the assailants caught him in a nearby yard and dragged him to the ground. One of them leveled a rifle. Please! No! Daniel pleaded, and closed his eyes. The yard exploded with bullets. Lead tore through his pelvis, thighs, buttocks, neck, and chin.
The execution party was long gone by the time police arrived. And once the media crews descended, the Sunday-night TV news scripts had been written: The community 140 miles southeast of Seattle was under attack. It was Yakima County’s 14th homicide of the year. By the end of 2010, the number would more than double.
CORONER JACK HAWKINS EXAMINED NEARLY EVERY ONE OF THE COUNTY’S 29 MURDERED CORPSES IN 2010, the most homicide victims his office had ever seen. Hawkins is a former cop—10 years with the Yakima County Sheriff’s office, another 15 with the Yakima Police Department—and he’s got the mustache to prove it. You know the mustache. Sam Elliott’s got one. The retired police chief in your hometown has one. It’s grown out extra long, over the lip, and gray as a cloud.
The coroner works out of a downtown office that looks less like a medical clinic than the space an auto mechanic might use to catch up on accounts receivable. Tools, in this case scalpels, compete for desktop space with mounds of paperwork. An unspent shotgun shell stands carefully balanced on its end next to a dusty unopened can of premixed Jack Daniel’s and cola. Leather-bound tomes filled with county death records dating back, presumably, to 1865, loom on a corner shelf.
Three metal examination tables clutter the room next door. Hawkins has witnessed unspeakable sights on these tables. Blue-lipped infants hit with SIDS. Suicide victims trucked in in pieces after jumping off the Interstate 82 bridge, 325 feet over Selah Creek. In 2007, he inspected the bodies of nine skydivers and a pilot after their plane crashed into the earth at 70 miles per hour. So it’s a lot to say that the Memorial Day weekend murder of Daniel Rivera got to him.
“We counted 31 bullet holes in his body, fired up close and personal,” Hawkins recalls. “It’s scary. You got these kids running around the streets and they come up and just shoot him. He was begging for his life, and they shoot him…. It was my understanding that they were looking for the whole family.”
By the time Hawkins completed his annual report, though—a sort of diary of the dead, filled with the clues each body left for the coroner to discover—Rivera’s case read like all the others, clinical and devoid of emotion. But 29 murders is an alarming statistic in a county with the population of Yakima, 243,000. That’s roughly one homicide for every 8,000 people. (In the same year, the city of Seattle experienced one homicide per 68,000 people.) It was the grim end to a savage half decade. From 2000 to 2004, Yakima murders had averaged about 11 a year. The number reached 24 in 2005, then dipped to 14 in 2006 and has been mounting ever since.
And yet only the Yakima Herald-Republic extensively reported the story, in just one article. Asked why the most homicides in county history and the highest rate in the state were downplayed, Hawkins pauses. And then, “I’m just going to be blunt here. Yakima is a farming community and it’s rural, and a lot of that industry doesn’t even exist anymore, so we depend a lot on the wine industry and tourism. I’m not saying people are downplaying it, but they don’t want people to be afraid to come here.”
KATHY COFFEY TRIED HER DAMNEDEST TO CALM THE FEW CITIZENS WHO’D GATHERED at the biweekly city council meeting. The six council members, plus the mayor, crowded around the U-shaped table in City Hall on Tuesday, June 1, two days after Daniel Rivera’s murder. Coffey, the 62-year-old council member and assistant mayor, whom the Herald-Republic once described as having “the energy of a five-year-old,” sat at the center, garbed in an olive green suit and beaded necklace. Earlier that day, she announced, she had phoned the offices of Governor Christine Gregoire and Senator Patty Murray, begging for state and federal aid to fight gangs. “We are going to get this taken care of, and I want you to know that we do have the people in place that will be working on this full time, overtime….”
A man cleared his throat, interrupting her.
She tilted her head to look over her reading glasses and two seats over. There shined the bald dome of council member Bill Lover, a former military man. “Some of this is the first I’ve ever heard of this,” Lover growled. “What I want to caution you against is moving so fast without letting the rest of the council know.”
Coffey snapped back. “I would remind you, Councilman Lover, that everything I identified today was presented at council, to council, and is not outside council’s approval.”
City employees reported several murders at locations without adequate street lighting.
Yakima’s violent crime had weighed on Coffey for years. Before taking office in 2008, she spent 19 years as CEO of the city’s visitor and convention bureau. More than once she’d endured that moment during a pitch when the event planner from, say, the Washington State Dental Association, stiffened in his seat and apologized: Look, Yakima is a lovely place, but…the gangs. We’ve decided to hold the convention elsewhere.
The city’s tarnished reputation stung in other ways, too. Coffey’s grandfather, Gil Burns, was mayor of Yakima in the mid-1950s. Over the decades she’d watched his legacy of economic improvement wither, supplanted by the city’s new image, first as a drug hub in the 1980s and early ’90s—when Crackima and Yakimeth were frequent sobriquets—and more recently as a gangland.
So when the chief of police briefed Coffey on Daniel Rivera, she didn’t hesitate to call the state’s top elected official. “I’m not asking you to look at this as a governor,” she told Gregoire’s office. “I’m asking you to look at this as a mother.” The mayor, Micah Cowley—one of Coffey’s closest allies—phoned attorney general Rob McKenna for help, too.
Lover was bothered that he hadn’t been consulted. “Am I free to go to the National Guard or people I know in DC? C’mon! Let’s do the policy with all seven of us!”
“After a young 18-year-old was executed on one of our streets in this community,” said Coffey, “I feel that it is within the right of the mayor and deputy mayor to contact the governor to say there’s a problem.”
“And it’s also within your realm to let us know you’re contacting ’em.”
“We just did.”
Published: November 2011
