SEATTLE — 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.
Ann Butts, the young man’s mother, said his family misses him every day.
“I can’t express how hurtful it was to learn that SPD endorsed joking about the killing of my son by displaying a fake tombstone with his name on it,” she said in a statement through her attorney, former King County public defender La Rond Baker.
“I didn’t think SPD could take more from me,” she said. “I was wrong.”
Baker, now the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, said the nonprofit is “extremely horrified by the behavior of the individual SPD officers responsible for this demonstration of deep disrespect” of Damarius Butts’ life.
“And we are even more disturbed that SPD allowed such a culture to flourish so openly in its ranks and in its precinct facilities,” said Baker, speaking for the ACLU. “Seattle deserves so much better from an agency sworn to protect Seattle residents.”
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.”
Baker said it appears the tombstone was taken from a Black Lives Matter memorial for people killed by police.
The department said it has “confirmed it is no longer there.”
Braden Pence, an attorney at the Seattle firm of MacDonald Hoague & Bayless, sued the SPD over the graffiti arrests and obtained the video through the civil discovery process in U.S. District Court. While that portion of the footage isn’t relevant to his clients’ arrests, Pence said he released it “because the people of Seattle have the right to know their police department.”
“The video shows a break room adorned with disturbing trophies and iconography,” Pence said, noting that in addition to the tombstone, the room contained a protester’s sign pleading for police to “Stop Killing Us.”
“Casually displaying the tombstone of a person you killed in your break room is disgusting,” Pence said. “The Butts family is owed a deeply felt apology for the horrific disrespect shown by SPD.”
The department could not say when the tombstone or Trump flag were first displayed, but added the Trump flag was “removed long ago.”
“The department does not know who hung that flag, but it was likely removed as improper political speech in the workplace,” SPD said in a statement.
The department said the video shows a “bicycle repair room … which is not frequented by many employees and is not considered a ‘common space,’ ” where displaying the partisan flag could be considered a violation of the law.
The video shows the room contains a couch, several chairs, a table, a TV, a refrigerator, and a washer and dryer — and was where officers Jamison Maehler, Nathan Biddle, Joseph Binder and a fourth unidentified officer were lounging when the graffiti call was broadcast.
Pence believes the existence of the tombstone and flag “hints at a deeper problem than a ‘few bad apples.’ ”
“Precinct leadership either tacitly approved or willfully ignored what was happening in the break room,” he said.
At the time the video was recorded, the Trump and American flags flanked the silhouette of the tardigrade with the words, “Live Tiny, Die Never” and a series of initials. The department said the image and phrase “are a reference to resilience under pressure” and that officials are “unaware of any improper connotation.”
Pence, however, suggests officers flew the Trump flag “in pride of place” next to a “never die” display, in a room containing protest trophies.
“In context, these elements contain a theme: a police department that believes it is in a life-and-death struggle against the community it is supposed to serve,” he said.
