LAST SUMMER, at 4:23 on a sunny weekday afternoon, Seattle Police Officer Daniel Amador was on routine patrol atop Queen Anne Hill when he saw something that might, in a less tranquil setting, not even blink on a cop’s mental radar. According to Amador’s subsequent report on the incident, a teenager crossed West McGraw Street, then West McGraw Place, diagonally, “without checking for traffic.” Wondering if the youth “might be intoxicated or mentally unstable, I circled around to make contact.” Four blocks later, in front of Coe Elementary School, Amador pulled up behind the young man, who was walking in the street near the curb, and told him to stop. “I explained that he was being stopped for pedestrian violations, to check on his condition…. He refused my order to identify himself and indicated he would leave the scene.”
Amador grabbed the youth’s arm and ordered him over to the squad car because, he recounted, they were blocking traffic. Two witnesses say there was no traffic.
“Are you arresting me?” the youth asked, because if not he would not get into the car. He pulled out a cellphone and said he wanted to call Assistant Chief Jim Pugel, whom he knew (he’s on a baseball team with Pugel’s son). Instead he called another family friend, contractor Pat McClure, who lived just 100 feet away. McClure came out and tried to resolve the impasse: “I know him, he’s Joey Wilson, Mary Wilson’s boy. What’s he done?”
“It’s a pedestrian violation.”
“Wait, I’ll call his mother. She lives close by.”
McClure called his wife, who called Mary Wilson at work. And, as witnesses often do these days, he went to get his video camera. When he returned, more officers had arrived. (At least five squad cars, one fire truck, and an unmarked car of the sort used by the police gang unit eventually converged on the scene). As McClure filmed, Amador and another (female) officer held Joe Wilson’s arms while a powerfully built male officer gave him several sharp punches to the midriff and an uppercut to the head. The female officer then punched him in the abdomen as well. A fourth officer stood by, apparently overseeing. The police incident report merely says that Wilson “resisted arrest by forcefully twisting his body and flailing his arms and legs.”
“I’m 17!” Wilson shouted. “I know Jim Pugel! I’m suing! I’m a minor!”
The officers pushed Wilson down to the street, forced his face into the pavement, knelt on him, and handcuffed him. They found a work paper in his pocket that confirmed his identity. They forced him up against the car, then into it.
McClure’s cellphone rang; he told the officers Joe’s mother was on her way. Rather than waiting they took Joe to the station. Mary Wilson followed them there and demanded to see her son. “They said they were screening him,” she told me soon afterward. According to Wilson that screening consisted of one of the officers who’d beaten him popping repeatedly into his cell and asking, “You’re on drugs, aren’t you?” Joe Wilson insisted on seeing a lawyer. McClure’s wife contacted a criminal defense attorney, Peter Friedman, who negotiated by phone to get Joe released. “I told them, the kid has some mental problems, you don’t want him having a breakdown in there.” (Joe Wilson has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which he controls with medication.)
Published: September 2010
We must have been, er, in a rush when we wrote that. Thanks for pointing out!
“Brakes,” not “breaks.”