“I can’t express how hurtful it was to learn that SPD endorsed joking about the killing of my son by displaying a fake tombstone with his name on it,” she said in a statement through her attorney, former King County public defender La Rond Baker. The department cleared the officers, and an inquest jury found the shooting justified.Īnn Butts, the young man’s mother, said his family misses him every day. Butts suffered 11 gunshot wounds and bled to death as officers waited outside.

Officers chased him onto a loading dock at the federal building on Western Avenue, where an exchange of gunfire left three officers injured - one seriously, with a bullet in his chest. The video also captures, on a shelf, a small gray mock tombstone, bearing a clenched black fist, the name Damarius Butts, his age (19) and the date he was killed by officers: April 20, 2017.īutts died after fleeing a robbery at a downtown convenience store where he had displayed a handgun and demanded beer. flag and a silhouette of a tardigrade - a tiny organism celebrated for being virtually unkillable.

The video was obtained as part of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Seattle’s graffiti laws, as the officers were on their way to arrest a group of protesters using chalk and charcoal to write political statements on a precinct exterior wall.Īs one of the officers stands to respond to the vandalism report, his body camera sweeps the room, showing the Trump flag, a U.S. The items were captured on officer body-camera video taken in January 2021, just months after the precinct became a focal point of Seattle’s protests against police violence and racism, part of the national outcry after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. The room at the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct also was decorated with a large “Trump 2020″ flag, in possible violation of state law and department policy regulating officers’ involvement in partisan politics while on duty. SEATTLE - The mother of a young Black man killed by Seattle police in 2017 is outraged and demanding an apology after learning officers kept a mock tombstone marking her son’s death on a shelf in a precinct break room. A Seattle Police Department vehicle near downtown Seattle.

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