A friend of mine attended Tuesday’s Seattle City Council meeting. I wasn’t there, so take this for what it is, secondhand, but if their account is accurate, what happened was genuinely grotesque.
The meeting included a proclamation honoring Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr. He was nineteen years old when he was killed near CHOP in 2020, and his family has spent five years carrying a weight most of us can’t fathom. His mother, Donnitta Sinclair, spoke about her son, and by all accounts, including what’s visible on video, she did so with a grace that most people in that room couldn’t hope to match. That should have been the whole story. A family, a moment of recognition, some small gesture of dignity from the city that failed to protect her son.
But that’s not what happened.
Some guy, not a family member, apparently some cannabis advocate, gets up during time that was reserved for family, and starts unloading on Mayor Katie Wilson. Demanding to know where she was. Accusing her of not caring about Black people. And every single councilmember just sat there. Silent. Not one of them said, “actually, the mayor wasn’t invited.” Not one of them mentioned that the event hadn’t been communicated to her office at all. They let the accusation sit in the room like it was established fact. My friend told me some of them, Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Deborah Juarez specifically, looked like they were enjoying it.
Let that land for a second. They are sitting behind a proclamation for a murdered young man, next to his grieving mother, and they are enjoying a political hit job playing out in front of them. Using her grief as a backdrop. Actively choosing to let a false impression calcify because it was useful to them politically.
My friend said it felt staged. And the more I think about it, the harder it is to argue with that read.
Here’s what makes it even more infuriating: afterward, Wilson and Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt rushed downstairs and found Sinclair outside the chamber. They explained they hadn’t known about the event. Hadn’t been invited. They wanted to honor Lorenzo, and they wanted her to know that directly. So the mayor, the one who was just publicly flogged for snubbing a grieving Black mother, was the one who sought that mother out to make it right. While the people who engineered the whole scene apparently just moved on with their day.
And Hollingsworth? When someone asked her afterward whether the mayor had even been invited, she dodged the question. That’s not an oversight. That’s someone who knows exactly what they did and has chosen obfuscation over accountability.
You can criticize Katie Wilson. Criticize her all day long, there’s plenty of material, this is Seattle city government, there’s always material. But you do not get to let a mother walk out of that chamber believing the mayor intentionally disrespected her dead son, when the truth is the mayor was never told the event was happening. That is a lie of omission with a human being’s grief as its instrument. That’s not hardball politics. That’s just ugly.
My friend’s theory is that certain members of that council are already running for mayor in everything but name, trying to death-by-a-thousand-cuts Wilson’s standing by converting every civic function into an ambush opportunity. I don’t know if that’s right. But if you are willing to use a proclamation for Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr. as your soft campaign launch, I genuinely want to know where your floor is. What’s the thing you won’t do? Because this family deserved one clean moment of acknowledgment from the city, and instead they got used as set dressing for someone’s political positioning.
There’s video on the Seattle Channel if you want to see it yourself. I wasn’t in that room. This is one person’s account. But if they’re right, a mother who has been grieving for five years walked into that chamber expecting a measure of dignity, and walked out having been quietly weaponized. And the people responsible are going to go home tonight completely fine with that.
That’s the part I can’t get past.
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