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.
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.
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 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.
As one of the officers stands to respond to the vandalism report, his body camera sweeps the room, showing the Trump flag, a U.S. flag and a silhouette of a tardigrade — a tiny organism celebrated for being virtually unkillable.
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.
Butts died after fleeing a robbery at a downtown convenience store where he had displayed a handgun and demanded beer. 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. Butts suffered 11 gunshot wounds and bled to death as officers waited outside. The department cleared the officers, and an inquest jury found the shooting justified.
The department, in a statement, said that while it does “not know how that item ended up on storage shelving, we have no reason to believe it was placed as a ‘trophy’ or with any pejorative intent.”
The department noted that the East Precinct was a focus of the Black Lives Matter protests, which had become sporadic but were ongoing when the officers responded to the graffiti protesters on New Year’s Day of 2021.
“Protesters often placed items such as these commemorating subjects of the use of force locally and nationwide around the precinct,” the department said. “It would not be unexpected that items left at the precinct might land on a storage shelf until disposition.”