ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2009, at 8:14am, a man walked into a strip mall coffee shop frequented by cops in Parkland, Washington, a Tacoma suburb 40 miles south of Seattle. Ignoring the barista’s greeting, he reached for a handgun under his coat and fired at a table of three uniformed police officers, hitting two in the head, killing them where they sat. The third cop stood up. The assassin shot him in the neck. A fourth officer, standing near the back of the shop, fired three shots, hitting the attacker in the back, then lunged, slamming him against the entryway door.
As they fought, the man wrested the officer’s gun from him and fired, killing the cop instantly. He then tucked the weapon into his coat and walked away, northbound on Steele Street, a four-lane blacktop that separates the strip mall from McChord Air Force Base.
The subsequent manhunt would be one of the largest in state history. And the breaking news coverage—for which The Seattle Times won a Pulitzer Prize—would not only test the boundaries between old and new media, but draw out tensions between two wounded institutions: the region’s law enforcement community, still reeling from the assassination of a Seattle policeman four weeks earlier, and the Northwest’s largest daily newspaper, which had recently undergone severe budget cuts and almost folded.
The crime’s implications would stretch from the Northwest to Arkansas to the nation’s capitol. It would impact the future of presidential politics. And it would challenge the public’s sense of how a tragedy should be covered—indeed the very purpose of a news organization—at the dawn of the new century.
The Times threw everything it had at the story. An estimated 150 reporters, photographers, and web producers worked the police massacre, starting with Sara Jean Green, the first staffer on the scene.
That morning Green’s assignment had been to interview runners at the finish line of the Seattle Marathon at Seattle Center. But by 9:30am she was making a mad dash for her car, parked eight blocks away. Her editor had called. Four cops shot and killed.
Green, a 36-year-old Ontario, Canada, native who started at The Seattle Times as an intern in 1999, sped her Honda Civic through Interstate 5’s Sunday morning traffic at 80 miles per hour only to find, when she got to Parkland, that she could only get within a quarter mile of the crime scene.
The police had set up a briefing area at a gas station down the street from the coffee shop. Ed Troyer, a gruff, mustached Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman, addressed the gathering media in a bulletproof vest, at one point cradling an assault rifle as he spoke. He explained that the four officers—later revealed to be members of the Lakewood Police Department—had been ambushed in a targeted assassination. (Lakewood, another Tacoma suburb, borders Parkland.) He said that the suspect, a black male, was last seen “walking this way,” right past the media staging area. “This is a hot area,” he later told the reporters and camera operators at a nearby storage facility where investigators thought the killer might be hiding. “So you’re kind of on your own.”
Green’s fellow Times reporters began following leads—and SWAT vehicles—to addresses throughout the Tacoma area. But when asked what he knew about the assassin, Troyer wouldn’t answer. “I’ll get back to you,” he kept saying.
What the spokesman didn’t know was that the Times newsroom already had the killer’s name.
Published: July 2010
Thanks for the feedback Richard. Glad you like the article. Yes, per the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations report, released on March 31, 2010, The Seattle Times did have 132 fewer weekday readers (not a few hundred) than The Oregonian. But in the same survey The Seattle Times’s Sunday edition outpaced The Oregonian’s by more than 41,000 readers.
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/ecirc/newstitlesearchus.asp
An excellent article, but it seems to make a minor error: “the Northwest’s largest daily newspaper, which had recently undergone severe budget cuts and almost folded.”
The latest audit bureau circulation numbers show that the Oregonian still has a larger circulation than the Times (albeit by a mere few hundred readers). The influx of the P-I subscribers is the reason that the Times is even close; traditionally the Oregonian numbers dwarfed the Times. We in Seattle have tended to assume that Seattle is bigger and badder than Portland in every way, but their newspaper has had a much bigger presence in their community over the last decade or two than the Seattle Times in ours.
The last lines say it all. Not really in the mood to celebrate. What a horrific time that was. First Off. Brenton and then four more killed. FOUR. Then shortly after Deputy Mundell was also killed. Six Police ambushed and killed in less than 2 or 3 months. We as a community aren’t recovered yet from it and I welcome new laws/rules that come from these awful crimes. I also relish that the animal’s friends and family that helped him are being send to jail. Throw away the key.
One thing I will correct: Huckabee’s shot at election wasn’t damaged…. it was destroyed. Blown to bits. And I like the guy AND am a Conservative. He MAYBE could have survived this but his attitude after the murders buried him. He said:
“What I fear is the hubbub of this case will make it so that not only in Arkansas, but in states across this country, these files won’t even get looked at,” Huckabee said at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
http://www.mynorthwest.com/?sid=256692&nid=11
I took GREAT offense to that. Our cries of why the hell that animal was here etc were not hubbub.Gripping and well-told story. This event took place in my South Seattle neighborhood, but I followed the events on the tiny screen of a netbook while I was living in Paris. The Times excellent coverage made everything feel so immediate that I felt almost as if I was here, in the ‘hood, detouring around police road blocks and keeping an eye out for the perpetrator. Here’s to a new generation of outstanding coverage!