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Last year's WTO chaos hard for city to shake
Mayhem touched lives deeply – in Seattle and abroad
Monday, November 27, 2000
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF
A year ago, the WTO turned Seattle into a made-for-CNN war zone, with tear gas, broken windows and mass arrests.
Seattle will never be the same.
Even now, no single perspective can tell the whole story. The chaos that surrounded the World Trade Organization's meetings touched thousands of lives, changing some forever.
Today and tomorrow, the Post-Intelligencer looks back at the WTO meetings through the eyes of these people, and others.
Shattered glass, mended life
Raquel Castro had seen trouble before the night of Nov. 30, 1999.
She had lived on the streets, done too many drugs and wrestled with mental illness. But those were private concerns, for her and her family.
Then, in one night, she became an icon for the mayhem loosed on Seattle. Television cameras caught her looting a Starbucks, then the nation saw her in Newsweek.
She acted not from politics, but impulse -- anarchy of her own making.
"Me and about eight to 10 friends came to Seattle to see what the fuss was all about," she told police later. "When we got to Starbucks some anarchists broke the window and went in. I got caught up in the moment and went in, too. When I got inside, I took a cash register and threw it outside. I also took all of the bagged coffee on the counter and threw it to the people outside. I felt like Santa Claus."
When she made the news, her family in Silverdale persuaded her to turn herself in. She pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary and was sentenced to one day in jail, a year of supervision and 160 hours of community service. She also must pay Starbucks more than $9,000.
When Castro stepped through the shattered Starbucks window, however, she took giant steps toward a better life. In a strange way, her mother's prayers were answered.
"I prayed for something to happen to put an end to her scary behavior, but never at anyone else's expense," Chris Castro wrote to a judge. "Seeing herself at the WTO seems to have stopped the risky behavior."
Raquel Castro and her family did not wish to comment for this story. But court papers describe a young woman who was bent on self-destruction.
From her first days in school, she was troubled. She didn't learn like other children.
Doctors decided she was bipolar, a mental illness marked by cycles of depression and elation. She left school and began using heroin and cocaine, according to court records.
Her life teetered on the edge, and she enjoyed the feeling.
"She likes to put herself in a precarious position. There's almost a death wish," a doctor wrote in 1997 after Castro was committed to an Idaho mental hospital. Before that, she had lived on the streets and in an abandoned building in San Francisco.
"I'll be dead by the time I'm 21. I'm not going to live very long," she told a doctor.
She was wrong. She turned 21 this year. She has held jobs, visited a counselor, taken her medication and lived with her parents, said her lawyer, John Henry Browne.
Struggles, of course, continue. Her balance remains fragile.
In September, Castro was in a rest room near Pike Place Market. A woman stepped in, covered in blood and carrying a knife, Browne said. Castro had become a witness in a murder investigation.
"That really set her back," Browne said.
Serving on street corners
It's not only the images from WTO that Noel Fryberger remembers. It's also the sound.
"Just before it all happened, you heard yelling and chanting and the banging of drums," said Fryberger, a sergeant with the King County Sheriff's Office. "I knew no good was going to come of that."
At first, WTO promised light duty for Fryberger and other officers from the Maple Valley precinct. They were stationed at Boeing Field, where nothing was going on. It was like spending World War II in Peoria.
A call for help came from Seattle police early on Nov. 30, and the deputies were rushed to the Washington Trade and Convention Center.
"Tens of thousands of people started showing up. We were caught right in the middle of it. Eighteen hours later, we were finally able to go home."
The group of 30 officers split into two squads as they tried to control crowds on street corners that were decked in Christmas lights.
"I didn't feel endangered, just nervous," said Fryberger, an ex-Marine. From the ground, the work was a blur. "I had no idea how bad it was. When you're standing there on the street, you don't get an aerial shot."
Later, when he managed to keep his eyes open long enough to watch television, Fryberger finally got a sense of the full story of WTO.
Tuesday on downtown streets stretched into Wednesday protecting President Clinton and patrolling Capitol Hill. Thursday and Friday were spent at the jail, where a crowd rallied in support of about 500 people under arrest.
Most protesters were "peaceful and nice," he recalled. Only a few "made it unpleasant for everybody."
Breaks were sparse. The Sheriff's Office served food at the Kingdome, but officers were spread throughout the city. Hotels invited officers in for quick trips through the buffet lines.
Fryberger remembers a strange contrast in the sights around him. In front of him were protesters, clouds of tear gas and the occasional flying bottle or rock. Behind him, under his protection, strode international delegates dressed in fine clothes.
An observer in harm's way
A photo instructor at Seattle Central Community College encouraged students to document the WTO protests, and Colin Brynn set out Nov. 30 with a camera in hand.
The experience didn't do much for Brynn's portfolio -- but left him with a knot on the side of his head. And a skepticism about police.
"If you want to start a riot, a sure way to do it is to call in the police," Brynn wrote in an e-mail from South America, where he is traveling.
On the first day of the conference, he positioned himself to photograph a confrontation near the Sheraton Seattle Hotel & Towers. From an awning, he watched bottles being thrown at police.
"The cops didn't stand for that, so they started firing tear gas, concussion grenades and rubber bullets randomly," he wrote.
"A cop saw me, pointed up and signaled for me to get down. I walked over to the light pole which I climbed up, looked down and saw five or six police surrounding the pole.
"I reached for the pole and saw a flash of red sparks. An incredible blow to my head followed and then a ton of blood."
Shot with a rubber bullet.
Brynn said he tried to climb down the pole. "They yanked me from the light pole to the ground. I was told to get the hell out of there. So I did."
In what he recalls as a "punch-drunk stupor," Brynn headed for the ferry dock to head home.
On the way, Brynn said several more rubber bullets slammed into his back. Darkness had fallen, and Mayor Paul Schell had ordered a curfew.
In the safety of Vashon Island, Brynn's doctor sewed up the gash on his head. Rubber bullets had also left welts on his legs and back.
"All in all, the WTO was peaceful," Brynn recalled. "Only a small number of people were causing trouble. Events and protests at the WTO should not have escalated into a small, one-sided war."
Today, he is convinced that police were unprepared and that he was a just a bystander swept up by events.
"The human mind has some sort of mechanism for blocking out and forgetting the painful occurrences," he said. "So, no, I don't think much about it, but when I do, it makes my blood boil."
Wonderment from abroad
In Rome, there was a rumor of war on the streets of Seattle.
Jamie Walker and 23 University of Washington students were in Italy as part of an art program when one student got an e-mail about riots at home.
"Then we started getting stuff from people on campus, saying, 'You'll never believe what's happening here,' " he said.
Walker, a professor, and the students began making calls and trolling the Internet for reports from Seattle newspapers. Walker's sister told him of tear gas getting into the vents of her downtown office and of chaos on the streets.
Menacing images in Italian newspapers and on television showed police in riot gear.
"You feel really powerless and out of the loop. You couldn't grasp how serious it was," Walker said.
A few days earlier, many students didn't know what WTO was, he said. Events in Seattle made them part of it, even though they were thousands of miles away.
The students also realized how little they had known about world politics, Walker said.
Italians around them were flabbergasted, "amazed by the level of police response," Walker recalled. "They kept asking, 'How could this ever happen in your country?' "
Farther north, in The Netherlands, there were not questions but praise for the events in Seattle.
"The newspapers and televisions were just aflame with Seattle news," said David Fenner, director of international programs and exchanges at the UW. "I had a special cachet when I told people I was from Seattle."
Fenner was at a European university convention. He left Seattle aware of what was occurring. It had been his job to prepare for a visit by Cuba's Fidel Castro to WTO and the university. When Castro canceled, Fenner was off to The Netherlands.
Fenner called home, and his 12-year-old son told him, "Dad, let me tell you how bad it's gotten. They've even trashed the Dumpsters."
European professors saw something of the '60s in Seattle and perhaps a rebirth of political awareness, Fenner said.
"They were looking at this as a kind of evidence that maybe America isn't the 800-pound gorilla that they thought. They said to themselves, 'Maybe they have as much dissension and turmoil after 200 years of union as we have.' "
First of two parts
A young man stumbled home, bleeding. A veteran deputy remained on the streets for long hours. And an art professor was transfixed, thousands of miles from home.
Seattle City police descend upon protestors in an image from last year's WTO protests.
P-I photo
"It's something you think about almost every day," he said of WTO. "I certainly don't want to do it again."
A scene from WTO protests in downtown Seattle. Protestors and city officials hope to avoid confrontation like that took place a year ago.
P-I photo
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