Tag: Seattle Police Department

Drugs, King County, Mayor Harrell, Police

Jail Bookings Will Resume for Drug Use, Other Misdemeanors In Downtown Seattle
The King County jail in downtown Seattle (Paul Kiefer/PubliCola)

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has agreed to begin booking people arrested for simple misdemeanors, such as violating a recently passed law criminalizing public drug use and possession, at the request of interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr, PubliCola has learned. The new policy will only apply to people arrested in the so-called Downtown Activation Zone, which stretches from the Chinatown-International District to the Denny Triangle, north of Belltown.

Since the COVID pandemic, the jail has not been booking people arrested for most misdemeanors. Initially, the jail stopped booking because of health concerns; more recently, the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has restricting bookings because of a chronic shortage of guards at the downtown jail.

According to SPD spokesman Eric Muñoz, the new policy is already in effect, and officers have been given authority to use their “discretion” to decide which people to book into jail and which to divert to other non-law-enforcement options, such as the CARE Team, We Deliver Care, and LEAD. Muñoz said officers haven’t been directed to focus on any offense in particular. The jail currently books people accused of driving under the influence and domestic violence, as well as people identified by City Attorney Ann Davison’s office as “high utilizers” of the court system.

“It really will come down to the individual officer and the discretionary decision they make,” Muñoz said. “Obviously, downtown, we do have prolific drug use, so I imagine a lot of officers will make that arrest, but we do have a CARE program, we have diversion, so there are a lot of options. So it will come down to the discretion of the officer.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

The decision is separate from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s decision this week to move forward on a contract with the South Correctional Entity, a jail in Des Moines where the city hopes to send misdemeanor defendants from Seattle. According to an internal SPD memo, the city plans to use SCORE to jail people who commit misdemeanors outside downtown.

At least six people have died at SCORE in just over a year. Under the proposed interlocal agreement between the city and SCORE, Seattle would have to pay to transport inmates from Des Moines to downtown Seattle for all court hearings, which are frequent in misdemeanor cases. King County ended its short-lived contract with SCORE last year.

PubliCola has contacted the DAJD to find out how the new policy will impact the jail, which has struggled to recruit new corrections officers. We will update this post when we hear back.

The city pays for about 195 beds in the downtown jail, of which about 80 were filled, on average, last month, according to a presentation City Davison gave to the city council’s public safety committee yesterday. In the past, the city and county have agreed to use some of the funding for those unused beds for health and housing programs, and last year, the council voted to place a proviso, or hold, on $3 million of the jail bed funding with the intent of putting that money toward inflation on future jail costs or other, non-jail purposes.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the agreement sent Wednesday afternoon. This is a developing story.

City Council, criminal justice, Drugs, Police

“A Shameful Legacy of Defund the Police”: Council Blames Protests, COVID for Current Public Safety Issues

Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr says she supports a new kind of secure detention for drug users, while City Attorney Davison blames jail booking restrictions for persistent problems downtown.

By Erica C. Barnett

Members of the Seattle City Council outdid each other calling for more police, more jail, and harsher punishments for people, like those who sell drugs, who “need to be contained,” as Councilmember Bob Kettle put it, during a meeting of the council’s public safety committee Tuesday morning.

Rob Saka, for instance, blamed the city’s current public safety issues on events from four years ago (and the fact that the King County Jail isn’t booking people for most misdemeanors, but more on that in a second). “The public safety challenges that we’re experiencing today are a shameful legacy of the Defund the Police movement,” Saka said. “And that was wrong then and it’s wrong now. And you know, from my perspective, defund is dead. It is not the dominant, controlling policy narrative dominating our policy discussions.”

After describing his “disadvantaged background,” Saka suggested that school closures during the COVID pandemic were also partly to blame. “There’s no way I would be here the dais right now if I had to rely on remote learning, adding that schools needed to be “the last to close and the first to reopen” during COVID.

Maritza Rivera, not to be outdone, said it made her “really angry” that people selling drugs in Magnuson Park, in her district, aren’t being arrested and jailed. “We need to be booking drug dealers, who are causing the most harm, and then diverting the users who actually need services,” she said. (Research indicates that nearly nine in ten people who sell drugs are also drug users.) “There’s a high school, there’s an elementary and a middle school off of Aurora, and these kids are getting solicited” by sex workers, Rivera added. 

Not to be outdone, Council President Sara Nelson said she was “shocked” by the fact that the average daily population at the jail is currently about 80, down from a pre-pandemic average of around 180 to 280. The jail imposed booking restrictions during the pandemic, and has kept those restrictions ever since because there are not enough jail guards to maintain safety standards with a higher inmate population. “I want my money back, basically,” Nelson said.

The purpose of the briefing was for interim Chief Rahr, Davison, and CARE (911) Department Chief Amy Smith—who had just received the committee’s unanimous vote for appointment as permanent chief—to update the council on the “criminal justice ecosystem.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Rahr, who has identified hiring more police officers as her primary goal, said the city should help applicants make it past the initial hurdles by adopting a police hiring test that’s more “low-barrier” than the one the city currently uses. Rahr’s comments seemed like an explicit swipe at the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, which has strongly supported keeping the current test, which was designed to help weed out people who are temperamentally unqualified to be officers.

“I know that [the PSCSC] believe  deep in their soul that the test they’re using now is extremely important,” Rahr said, but “my experience in police hiring is the first initial screening test doesn’t need to go that deep, because we’re literally just trying to make sure people have the minimum qualifications, [and then] we have a deep backgrounding process.”

In the competition for police officer applicants, she continued, “the agency that makes that removes the most barriers to get in the door is going to have a larger pool.”

As we’ve reported, the PSCSC supports the current test, developed in collaboration with SPD in response to the 2012 federal consent decree, because it was designed to help weed out candidates who would have problems adhering to Seattle’s constitutional policing requirements. Last week, the PSCSC announced that more people applied and passed the exam in June than in any month since 2019.

Davison said that in her view, the reason crime has gotten so bad downtown is that poliec—who now have the authority, thanks to a law adopted last year, to arrest people for misdemeanor drug use—still can’t book people into the downtown jail for misdemeanors like drug possession, smashing windows, or animal cruelty.

Wait—animal cruelty? Davison said she brought up animals because animal cruelty is often a precursor to domestic violence*, and it’s important to catch it early to prevent young people from becoming abusers in the future. Davison did not explain how being locked up in the King County Jail rehabilitates people who commit misdemeanor animal abuse (harming animals is also a gross misdemeanor and a felony, depending on the extent of the abuse), although she did say she was specifically referring to “early interventions” for young people.

Saka called the booking restrictions “a real head-scratcher,” and said that without the threat of jail, there is “no deterrence whatsoever to any crime—zero.” Criminals, he continued, “can violently smash a business’s window without fear of being booked, to spend a night in jail to think about that. … And animal cruelty—they locked Michael Vick up for years for animal cruelty, and in the city of Seattle, someone can’t spend a night in jail? They can freely abuse an animal. We need to do better.” (Vick was convicted of multiple felonies stemming from his involvement in a dog-fighting ring, and served 21 months in federal prison.)

Rivera said she was “super angry that we’re paying for service that we’re not getting,” referring to county jail beds. “We are not trying to jail folks that have addiction—we need to help these folks—but we need to get the people that are causing the most harm, that are taking advantage of our vulnerable populations, and these people need to be in jail.”

Davison did point out that people who wind up in her “high-utilizers initiative” can be booked into jail under an agreement between Seattle and the county.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed a new contract with SCORE, the regional jail in Des Moines, to incarcerate people accused of misdemeanors in Seattle.

The potential contract is controversial. In May, members of the union that represents staff for the King County Department of Public Defense sent a letter to city officials, including the council, opposing the contract, arguing that the regional jail makes it difficult for people to speak to their attorneys and get to court hearings in Seattle, diminishing the quality of representation they receive. As we’ve reported, six people have died in custody at SCORE in just over a year, including at least one from malnutrition and dehydration; SCORE contracts its medical service out to a private company, Wellpath. King County halted its own pilot program to transfer inmates to SCORE last year.

Rahr said she would also support a “third” kind of secure detention facility for people who commit drug-related crimes, including public drug use, separate from jail or diversion programs like LEAD.

“There are some people who are too medically fragile to be booked in jail, but they’re also too dangerous to be left in an emergency room or be left in a community,” Rahr said after the meeting. “If we had a place to take them that was secure, where they could get the medical intervention they need, particularly for people who are on fentanyl… we could significantly improve the conditions on the street” while also getting people “stabilized and connected with the services they need.”

Asked, after the meeting, about her comment that she wanted the city’s money back, Nelson said, “I do want to make sure that the terms of the contract that we have with the jail are being fulfilled. If we are paying for jail services and we are not getting them, what’s the deal? We need some place to take the people who are perpetrating crimes against my constituents.”

In previous years, the city has clawed back funding that would otherwise have paid for empty jail beds and repurposed it for community-based health and housing programs. During the 2022 budget process, the council voted to place a proviso, or hold, on $3 million the city would have otherwise spent on jail beds it wasn’t using, with the intent of putting that money toward inflation on future jail beds or to other, non-jail purposes. Nelson voted against the amendment.

*And certainly not, as we cynically assumed, because Seattle residents care more about dogs than human beings trapped in the carceral system.

Police

Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr Fires Officer Who Joked About Death of 23-Year-Old Pedestrian

By Erica C. Barnett

Interim Seattle police chief Sue Rahr used a rare all-staff memo to announce her decision to fire police officer Daniel Auderer, whose laughter and jokes about the death of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula were caught on body camera footage last year.

Auderer, the vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, was speaking to SPOG president Mike Solan when he made comments minimizing the incident, in which SPD officer Kevin Dave struck and killed Kandula in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour, and joking that her life had “limited value.”

SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright reported Auderer’s comments to the city’s Office of Police Accountability after coming across them while reviewing video related to the incident. OPA investigates police misconduct allegations and makes disciplinary recommendations, but the police chief has the ultimate say over how to discipline an officer. In Auderer’s case, OPA director Gino Betts recommended discipline ranging from a 270-day suspension to termination.

Auderer made his comments about Kandula shortly after interviewing Dave and determining that he was not intoxicated. During the call with Solan, he inadvertently turned on his body camera, which captured his side of the conversation.

“I don’t think she was thrown 40 feet either,” Auderer told Solan. “I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead.” Then Auderer laughed loudly at something Solan said. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah.”

“Yeah, just write a check,” Auderer continued. Then he laughed again for several seconds. “Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” At this point, Auderer turned off his camera.

In explaining her decision, Rahr said she took into account the “impact” of Auderer’s statements, as opposed to the “intention.” Auderer and Solan have both claimed that they were engaging in a kind of gallows humor typical of police, and that they thought they were having a private conversation.

“I believe the impact of his actions is so devastating that it cannot be mitigated by his intent to keep his conversation private,” Rahr wrote. The hurt his words have inflicted on Ms. Kandula’s family cannot be erased. The actions this individual police officer have brought shame on the Seattle Police Department and our entire profession, making the job of every police officer more difficult.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Auderer is well-liked among his coworkers, and Rahr’s decision will almost certainly be unpopular among many in SPD’s rank and file. Rahr acknowledged that people in the department would probably be angry about her decision. But, she wrote, “It is my duty as the leader of this organization to uphold the high standards necessary to maintain public trust. For me to allow the officer to remain on our force would only bring further dishonor to the entire department. … I deeply regret the negative impact my decision has on him as an individual officer, who clearly loves his profession and his colleagues. But I have the duty and obligation to prioritize the good of the entire organization over an individual officer.”

Auderer’s callous remarks became international news, and have arguably prompted more widespread and vocal outrage than Kandula’s death itself.

Dave, who was fired by the Tucson Police Department and had a history of concerning incidents before SPD hired him in 2022, remains employed by SPD. Last month, Rahr told PubliCola she was looking at Dave’s case closely, along with Auderer’s, and would make a disciplinary decision when she knew all the facts.

Police

Pierce County Declines to Charge Deputy Seattle Police Chief Over Domestic Violence Allegations

A/C Eric Barden

According to prosecutors, the claim was filed shortly after Barden got engaged to Amy Smith, the head of Seattle’s CARE Department.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Pierce County Prosecutor has declined to charge Deputy Police Chief Eric Barden in a criminal case involving an allegation of domestic violence by his ex-girlfriend. The woman accused Barden of slapping her, grabbing her, and pushing her into a banister during an argument at Barden’s house in January 2023.

In a memo explaining the decision, deputy prosecutor Megan Winder wrote that the case would rest entirely on the woman’s testimony about what happened, and that her “impeachability” would be a problem because she told prosecutors she wanted to make Barden pay by losing his job.

“Specifically, I am concerned about the victim’s statement about the suspect losing his job and not deserving the kind of money that he is making, as well as the timing of the disclosure of the allegations being close in time to when the suspect got engaged and appears happily ensconced in a new relationship.”

Barden is engaged to Amy Smith, the head of the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement team. The CARE Department, formerly known as the Community Safety and Communications Center, includes the city’s 911 center and a team of civilians who respond to low-priority 911 calls, accompanied by police.

In a memo responding to Winder, Pierce County Prosecutor Mary Robnett wrote that she agreed Barden’s ex-girlfriend had credibility issues, given the reasons she gave prosecutors for coming forward with her allegations this year, rather than in 2023 when the alleged abuse took place.

“Her explanation for reporting now is that ‘he should not hold the position he holds’ and ‘people should know what kind of person he is.’ This explanation for the delay also undermines her credibility.”

Additionally, Robnett wrote, the woman’s actions could be seen as “vindictive” because Barden became engaged to Smith shortly after their relationship ended. “Apparently at least one witness believes she may be motivated to be vindictive because she believes he has a new relationship with another woman.” This theory was also floated to PubliCola by someone close to Barden.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Robnett also said the fact that the woman waited so long—15 months—to report the alleged incident; the fact that she had no physical signs of injury; and the fact that she admitted being drunk the night the alleged abuse took place all called her credibility into question. “[I]n terms of assessing credibility, the victim reports that she was intoxicated during the events but avers that she remembers ‘100%.’ She then goes on to say that she doesn’t really remember the chain of events and she doesn’t remember which side of her face got slapped.,” Robnett wrote.

“According to the victim, any existing video of the event will corroborate that she was intoxicated, screaming and angry.”

Barden is still under investigation by the Seattle Office of Police Accountability for allegedly asking a Pierce County deputy to lie on a police report and not arrest the woman after a separate incident, when she allegedly violated a protective order Barden obtained against her after the January incident by showing up at his house and banging on the door. The allegations have landed Barden, at least temporarily, on Pierce County’s “Brady list”—a list of officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline can help.

Media

Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz Threatened PubliCola Over Post Describing His Coming-Out Interview

We need your help offsetting the cost of defending ourselves against the former police chief’s lawsuit threat.

By Erica C. Barnett

Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz, who was removed from his position earlier this year, threatened to sue PubliCola, and me personally, unless we removed a post describing the interview he did with conservative talk show host Jason Rantz.

In that interview, Diaz came out as gay and called the allegations in a complaint filed by several women, which included sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, “absurd.” (Since Diaz’ interview, four of the women have filed a lawsuit against the city and SPD.)

In his threat against PubliCola, Diaz claimed we had defamed him by suggesting that he considered being gay a defense against claims that he harassed or made sexual overtures to women. Many other observers, including KIRO radio, the Seattle Times, and the South Seattle Emerald, had a similar interpretation of Diaz’ interview, but as far as we were able to ascertain by speaking with other outlets, PubliCola was the only publication the former chief singled out for an explicit lawsuit threat.

Because our post was not libelous, we did not remove it; instead, we hired our own lawyers to fight back, which is what we would expect from any media outlet threatened by a baseless libel lawsuit.

We’re very glad to say that the matter is finally resolved, thanks to the capable work of our attorneys, who went above and beyond in responding to Diaz’ legal threats. However, high-quality representation is extremely expensive, and we were forced to spend many thousands of dollars on attorneys’ fees. That money came directly out of PubliCola’s budget, which funds our day to day operations as a small, independent, free publication.

Would you help us out by contributing what you can to offset the cost of our legal representation? (Other options, including Venmo, check, and subscription options, on our Support page). If 50 people can give $200 each, we’ll be well on our way to recouping our legal fees, which we expect to come in somewhere in the low five figures. If ten of you can give $1,000, we can knock out our legal bills this week.

This isn’t just about PubliCola, although I can’t overstate how much we need and appreciate your help defraying these major expenses. If public officials can silence journalists by threatening them with baseless lawsuits, it isn’t just one publication that’s vulnerable—it’s any journalist who makes powerful public figures mad by reporting on them, providing analysis, and holding them accountable.

The lawsuit threat was the first communication PubliCola received from Diaz. SPD’s communications office never requested changes to the post or respond to it any way.

In their initial letter, Diaz’ lawyers claimed that my post “contains multiple false and defamatory statements and you should retract it immediately—not just because it opens you and Publicola [sic] up to a libel lawsuit, but because it’s what any responsible journalist would do.” The letter, which arrived just before noon on a Thursday, gave PubliCola until 3pm the following to take the post down or get sued.

“We hope that won’t be necessary, and that you have the integrity to retract the post without further prompting. Please let us know when you and Publicola [sic] will delete the post,” the attorneys, Mark Thomson and Andy Phillips, with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch, wrote.

The word “integrity” was followed by a footnote referencing a college journalism textbook.

PubliCola stands by our post about Rantz’s Diaz interview, and we do not admit any liability, factual errors, or anything else in our agreement with Diaz. The post remains online with minor edits, made after an iterative process with Diaz’ attorneys, that do not change our original reporting or analysis of the interview.

In some cases, these edits provide clarity Diaz felt was lacking (for example, adding the name of Diaz’ local attorney, Ted Buck, to the article, since Diaz believed one reference could be interpreted as referring to Diaz himself); in others, we are attempting to avoid the considerable expense that would be involved in fighting a lawsuit by the former police chief—a powerful, highly connected man with ambitions to become the police chief in Austin, Texas. The changes are edits agreed upon during legal negotiations, not corrections.

For example, the post now says that Diaz “suggested that his being gay undermines the claims of the women who have accused him of with sexual harassment, discrimination, and creating a hostile work environment.” We also removed a parenthetical sentence unrelated to the subject of the story, which briefly summarized a KUOW story that Diaz and Rantz discussed during their conversation.

Diaz’ attorneys noted that Diaz told Rantz, “just because you’re a gay man doesn’t mean you can’t be a misogynist,” which we agreed to add to the post along with some context from the interview:

In the interview, Rantz asked Diaz, “in retrospect, had you come out earlier, would that have saved your job?” Diaz responded, “You know, it’s a good question. I think it addresses a lot of the concerns of what people had. I mean, it doesn’t—you know, just because you’re a gay man doesn’t mean that you can’t be a misogynist…”

To prove libel, Diaz would have to prove that PubliCola made a false assertion of fact; that this falsehood caused Diaz demonstrable harm; and that we did so knowing that the factual claim was false and made it anyway with “reckless disregard” for the truth.” None of these claims apply to our post.

Moreover, Washington state has additional protections against “bullying by lawsuit.” In 2021, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law that “fast-tracks review of dubious lawsuits,” according to the Seattle Times, providing unique protections against SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuits, whose aim is to “intimidate people into silence.”

If you agree that public officials shouldn’t use their power and resources to try to silence journalists, please contribute to help us offset the legal fees we incurred defending against Diaz’ threats against us. (Additional options here). If you’d like to learn more about those threats, read on.

Continue reading “Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz Threatened PubliCola Over Post Describing His Coming-Out Interview” →

Crime, homelessness, Police

Man Strangled by Enraged Vehicle Owner Had Just Secured Housing, Enrolled in CoLEAD Program
A real-estate listing for the high-end apartment building where the alleged homicide took place

NOTE TO NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS: Due to a publishing error by me, the author, previous version of this post went out to subscribers, and onto the website, with the entire text of the story in the headline. My apologies for the error!

By Erica C. Barnett

Content warning: Brief description of violent death.

On July 4, the Seattle Police Department released an unusually vague report about an investigation into a death that occurred 10 days earlier in the parking garage of a high-end apartment building on the edge of Green Lake, where monthly rent ranges from around $2,000 to $5,500.

According to the post on SPD’s Blotter blog, officers responded to a car prowl report involving a man “potentially armed with a knife” arrived at the garage, “found this male unconscious” and rendered aid until medics responded and took him to Harborview hospital, where he died two days later.

Upon further investigation, the report continues, officers “determined the owner of the vehicle interrupted the car prowl and confronted the male, and they got into a physical altercation. During the altercation, the man fell unconscious, and the vehicle owner separated from him.”

The report does not provide any details behind the odd phrase “he fell unconscious,” although it notes that man’s death is being investigated as a homicide. (According to the King County Prosecutor’s Office, no charges have been filed.)

Nor does it explain why officers didn’t arrest the vehicle owner for killing the man, whose name was Cameron Lewis Heriford.

It does, however, include a photo showing the tools the man had with him, carefully arrayed on a table in the style police use for displaying evidence associated with a crime, such as guns and cash; they include a credit card, screwdrivers, a crowbar, and a small hatchet. The purpose of the photo is unclear, since the person they belonged to is not accused of any crime and, of course, can no longer be arrested or charged with anything.

Local TV stations ran with the photos and the police department’s narrative, in some cases strongly implying that the man who killed Heriford did so in self-defense.

SPD wouldn’t provide any additional details about the arrest. But a King County Medical Examiner report reveals that Heriford, contrary to SPD’s banal description, didn’t just “fall unconscious” during an “altercation.” He was choked to death, by the still-unnamed owner of the vehicle he was allegedly breaking into. Instead of immediately calling 911 or confronting Heriford nonviolently, as people who had previously reported him to police had done, the apparently enraged vehicle owner strangled him so severely that his breathing stopped, oxygen stopped flowing to his brain, and he later died.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Why didn’t SPD include this information in their report? Why did they let the man who acknowledged killing Heriford—causing him to “fall unconscious”—walk away? And why did they display Heriford’s thieves’ tools, if not to suggest they were relevant to his death—in a case that, had Heriford been arrested and prosecuted, would lead to a fine and jail, at most?

A spokesperson for SPD declined to answer our questions, telling PubliCola, “The information I posted on the Blotter is all that we are allowed to release at this time.”

Heriford, who was 35 when he died, was relatively well known to Seattle police, who sometimes encountered him when doing “crime prevention efforts” at the encampment under I-5 in Northeast Seattle where he lived, according to one police report. Between October 2022, when court documents show SPD officers first arrested him for an attempted break-in, and his death this year, Heriford was was charged in at least five theft or attempted theft cases, most of those in the garages of apartment buildings like the one where he died. The items Heriford was accused of included suitcases, paddleboards, motorcycles, and cars.

He pled guilty to a domestic violence assault charge in 2009 and was charged with violating a no-contact order in that case several times between 2010 and 2012, but court records indicate he was never charged with another violent crime.

Heriford, who lived in Shoreline and Seattle before he became homeless, had recently started on a trajectory that could have made him significantly less likely to commit property crimes. In February, through a King County Regional Homelessness Authority initiative for resolving encampments on state-owned property, he entered CoLEAD, an intensive shelter and case management program designed for people with significant behavioral health needs and those who are involved in the criminal justice system. (The program is run by Purpose Dignity Action, which also operates the diversion program LEAD). In May, Heriford hit a CoLEAD milestone when he moved into permanent housing.

The next step for Heriford was supposed to be “aftercare”—intensive case management that continues after a person secures a place to live. According to PDA Co-Executive Director for programs, Tara Moss, “Housing is only one need for most of the people who enter CoLEAD; for most, intensive case management may be needed for a long time to address complex challenges in building a life with lawful income, addressing substance use disorder, and undoing the impact of debt, incarceration and trauma in early life. Housing is the beginning, not the end, of the changes needed for most of our participants.”

Unfortunately, Heriford never got the opportunity to make those changes. He died on June 28, four days after the attack.