Grief
Part 5 of "COINTELPRO in the Digital Age"
Contents: Two shootings happen near the protest; protesters are falsely implicated; rumors spread that a gang wants revenge against protesters
Note: These essays reflect the author’s present recollection of events. Some names and characteristics have been changed.
Due to complaints from local businesses and residents, and an amplification of those complaints by the city and police, we committed to have quiet hours at the autonomous zone at night. People also wanted to move away from the “party protest” image that detractors were assigning us. Juneteenth, which was on Friday, June 19th that year, was to be the first quiet night. But on the night of Juneteenth, a young man was killed near the encampment, and another man was shot.
I was not there that night, but I know people who were. According to those witnesses, a group of people came to CHAZ, which was now called CHOP, hoping to party there for Juneteenth. Security was on high alert by this time. We had dealt with police announcing fake sightings of the Proud Boys on their scanners, and there had also been real incidents of white supremacists coming to the space to threaten us. Plus the security team was helping institute quiet hours that night. The group, which included 19-year old Lorenzo Anderson, was turned away. They moved down the 900 block of Pine Street, closer to Molly Moons, and hung around there instead. Molly Moons is about half a block away from the barricades that were at 10th & Pine.
Later that night, a young man named Marcel Long also came into that area. He and Anderson had a long-standing conflict. According to Anderson’s mother, Long had bullied Anderson for years. The two had a verbal confrontation of some sort, Anderson tried to get away from the situation, but Long shot him multiple times as he attempted to retreat. Then Long fled the scene.
Protesters (I do not know how many) ran to Anderson’s aid after he was shot. We had a medic area set up right inside the barricades, next to a taco spot that had a large parking lot. A couple people carried Anderson to the medic area. Calls went out to 911 immediately, at 2:19 am.
According to a timeline constructed by KUOW, and witnesses I spoke with the next day, Anderson’s vitals faded pretty quickly after he was shot. Protest medics performed CPR. The fire department arrived on the scene, but they would not get out of their truck and render aid. They just sat there while people begged them to actually respond to the incident they’d responded to. An ambulance also arrived, but they sat at Broadway and Pike, about two blocks away, rather than coming to the scene.
Meanwhile police sat at 12th & Cherry, less than a mile away, where they say they were waiting for the fire department to meet them. The fire department says they were waiting on police to join them where they were, to clear the scene for them to enter. The two departments were communicating with dispatchers on two different channels.
Protesters and medics attempted to get instructions on how to possibly transport Anderson to an ambulance if an ambulance wouldn’t come to them, but they were given conflicting information. After 15 minutes of waiting, they put Anderson into the back of a pickup truck and drove him to a meet-up spot they’d discussed with first responders. No one was there. Next they drove Anderson to Harborview Medical Center, all the while continuing to perform compressions.
The police arrived at 10th & Pine twenty minutes after the first 911 calls. They entered the protest via Pine Street on foot, passing the location of the shooting, with shields, flashlights, and weapons at the ready. Anderson was already en route to the hospital. He was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at Harborview at 2:45 a.m. on June 20th. He’d just graduated high school the day before.
Around the same time medics were arriving at the hospital with Anderson, there was a second shooting in the area outside CHOP, several blocks away from the first one. The 33-year old victim survived after being assisted by protest medics, who drove him to Harborview as well. He says his shooting was a hate crime. To my knowledge, police have not apprehended any suspects.
Contradictions
I watched the aftermath of the shooting via a livestream. I saw people screaming and crying, begging the fire department to help. I saw the police come, with large guns. Protesters and even media tried to tell police that the victim had already been transported to the hospital. A person in distress asked them to put away their weapons because people had just experienced a shooting. On a different stream, I saw two men who said they knew Anderson talking with the streamer, saying they knew “who did it,” and strongly suggesting they would get revenge.
When asked about why they failed Lorenzo Anderson that night, the fire department would say they had to wait on clearance from the police to enter the scene of a shooting. The police would claim they did not know where to rendezvous with the fire department. Police also claimed they were met with a “hostile crowd” that prevented them from rendering timely aid, which is simply not true, and is contradicted by video evidence.
What extremely few people have reported is that police were refusing to answer calls from the public not just within the protest (where we didn’t want them) but within a larger area around the protest as well. This was a move that essentially punished the community for supporting us. This exclusion area included the 900 block of Pine Street, where Anderson was shot. This is a significant fact that almost certainly pertains to what happened that night.
Also, I think it’s worth noting that the fire department had never been unwelcome in the protest. Their personnel came and went as they pleased, including the fire chief. Even on May 30, when the fire department came to put out a blazing police car downtown, I witnessed protesters divide like the Red Sea to let them through.
Indeed, a few encampment regulars had reached an agreement with the fire department just days before Juneteenth, in which the department was allowed to put concrete barricades down the middle of Pine Street (the street that ran through the encampment). This was done specifically for fire trucks and ambulances to move through and into the protest area in case of an emergency. It reduced the size of the usable area of the encampment and hindered our movements, since a lot of the foot traffic was on Pine Street. To my knowledge, the fire department never said they would need a riot gear-clad police escort to enter the encampment, and we had never behaved towards them in a way that would justify it.
I understand the need to clear a scene to make sure there’s not an active shooter, but there was time to do that while they all sat in their vehicles. Why was the fire department not at the location they’d discussed with medics as a meet-up point? Why did it take so long to correct the alleged misunderstandings between police and fire? How did Anderson wind up in the exact same place as his opp that night? Why were so many shooters in the area on the night that was to be our first quiet night? Why is it that protesters were the only people on the scene trying to save these men’s lives? These are the questions I still have.
And yet we have grief as well, one that we have hardly been allowed to name and fully process.
The beginning of the end
Everything changed after that night. Rumors started swirling within the encampment that the Bloods gang wanted revenge on the medics for Anderson’s death. (I am not saying he was a member of a gang. I am saying that rumors about the Bloods wanting to harm protesters were spread at the encampment.) According to the rumors, they believed that he bled out on the medic’s table because protesters wouldn’t let medical aid get to him. There were also rumors about a gang-related turf war over the encampment, with various gangs allegedly staking claim to the area. Hearing gunshots at night became a somewhat regular occurrence.
The medics disbanded. Mr. Anderson’s loved ones set up a manned memorial near 10th & Pine, close to the old medic’s station. Fewer members of the public came to the space, and fewer protesters. CHAZ had been an affirming community gathering. CHOP was now a danger zone. All the headlines said “man shot in CHOP” or “man killed in CHOP,” even though the truth is he was not let into the protest, so he couldn’t have possibly been shot there.
Among the protesters, some expressed a feeling not uncommon to those who experience a tragedy: they felt that if the encampment had never existed, Lorenzo Anderson never would have died. I know people who hid from the gunshots, who begged for help from the fire department. They struggled with depression and PTSD afterwards. I know someone who ran to Mr. Anderson after he was shot, disregarding their own safety to try to help him. Their stories are not mine to tell. His family’s story is also not mine to tell.
And yet we have grief as well, one that we have hardly been allowed to name and fully process. There’s been no duty of care from the public around Anderson’s memory, his loved ones, nor the trauma of those protesters who were there that night. Instead, there has been anti-BLM propaganda and anti-leftist propaganda produced using his death as a backdrop. Over the last six years, I’ve seen it on social media, targeting Black people with misinformation that white leftists killed him. I’ve also seen this tragedy sensationalized on right wing media platforms to further the narrative that “people on the left” are violent and dangerous. I’ve seen people become ashamed to be associated with the protest due to the effectiveness of these narratives. It’s led to a failure to ask real questions about what happened to Mr. Anderson, or to us.