A 17-year-old boy died in a shooting in Belltown late Sunday, and a 21-year-old man suffered serious injuries from a gunshot, according to Seattle police.
It marked seventh person shot in the Belltown neighborhood in three separate incidents over 24 hours on Labor Day weekend. Three have died.
Seven people shot in 24 hours, 3 of them fatally. Belltown is at the bottom of the hill where I live, so I traverse it most days because the bus route is through Belltown. At the west end it’s next to Seattle Center/the Space Needle, and at the east end it traverses a kind of ground zero for addicts. There’s one stop where people sell stolen goods all day – there are tables and chairs, and a boombox, and rows of random items for the discerning shopper to choose from. It’s very bizarre – everyone knows the goods are stolen, but nobody does anything about it. The city government policy is hands off – let the addicts slowly kill themselves on the street, and let the people who shoplift random merch sell it on the sidewalk right next to a brand new posh skyscraper that appears to be standing empty gee I wonder why.
A couple of blocks west, closer to the Needle, there’s a small grocery store that appears to have zero clientele other than the addicts who spend the day slumped outside it. I always wonder how that works – how does it not go bankrupt? I have no idea.
And Belltown isn’t even the worst. 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon is notoriously the worst. The police do a sweep now and then, and hours later the addicts are back.
Thanks, fentanyl.
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