The bus stop is at 145th Street and Aurora Avenue. There was a city bus there; if I run the two blocks fast enough, I thought, maybe I can catch it.
Then I noticed the two law enforcement vehicles, sturdy vans with red and blue lights flashing from the windows. One was parked directly in front of the bus; the other was in the driveway of a nearby storefront.
The bus remained at the stop as a third law enforcement vehicle made an assertive U-turn in the middle of the street to join the other two.
I stopped walking. I took a few steps forward, then stopped again.
“No, this doesn’t seem right… I can catch the bus at the next stop,” I muttered out loud.
It was a few minutes after 11am on Tuesday, November 8th, in the year of our Lord 2022.
There is essentially no sidewalk on the west side of Aurora Avenue. I reached the bus stop at 135th Street on Aurora; no bus was coming. I kept walking, squeezing myself between the parked cars and the businesses along the street. I had faith that a sidewalk would soon appear.
I heard the rumbling first. A bulky black box with thick treads on its large wheels approached. A man wearing a helmet and sunglasses inside the armored vehicle glanced out the open window. The red and blue lights in the front and on top of the vehicle were not on. The white “SWAT” lettering on its side gleamed in the late morning sunlight.
A few minutes later, a second armored SWAT vehicle rumbled past.
“What is happening?” I asked.
A photo of the 14-year-old was distributed to all Seattle police and an officer located the two teens on a Metro bus at North 145th Street and Aurora Avenue North at 11:02 a.m., the charges say.
Seattle Times: What prosecutors say happened at Ingraham High before the fatal shooting
I had to cut through a car dealership on Aurora because there still wasn’t a sidewalk. Despite the sun floating in the blue of the sky, I put the black beanie back on my head. Underneath my black wool winter coat was a black puffer jacket; a grey scarf was knotted around my neck. I continued to look for a sidewalk. I was apparently unwilling to cross the street.
The young women already knew that there is no sidewalk on Aurora, so they stood in the street. Their hands, adorned with colorful fingernails, tossed their shiny, long hair over their shoulders. Their shorts and skirts stopped just past the curvature of their hips, exposing the bare skin of their legs to the gaze of drivers and the cold morning air. The cropped jackets covered their arms, but not their cleavage. Their eyelashes looked like small, dark butterflies on their cheeks. Shades of red, pink, and purple were on their lips.
They weren’t yet waving at cars passing by.
One of them waved at me as I approached and called, “Hey!”
We made eye contact; she grinned. “What do you call those big cats that live in the hills?”
I reflexively smiled back at her, though did not stop walking. “Mountain lions?” I guessed.
Her rosy lips bloomed into a satisfied smile. She nodded, pointed at me, and said, “I like that.”
I shrugged and kept walking. I wished she and her peers weren’t standing out there. I wondered what their circumstances were. I prayed for their health and safety. I thought about why she asked me this peculiar question. (I only learned about REST, real escape from sex trafficking, after this conversation.)
I continued to look for a sidewalk.
About a week later, I boarded the light rail at the most northern stop. It was another sunny and cold day.
Many young people were on the train. Some of them had signs. I couldn’t read all of them; I spied one that was upside down that included the word “GUNS”.
They poured out of the train at Pioneer Square. Many of them had traveled over 130 blocks to join other students at Seattle City Hall to
[call] for better mental health support, more restrictions on gun access and more training for security staff in the wake of a shooting Tuesday at Ingraham High that left one student dead.
Seattle Times: At rally, Seattle students demand more mental health resources, gun safety measures
I looked up, shielded my eyes from the sun, and squinted at the blue of the sky, white of the snow, and grey of the mountains.
Maria Yang, MD 