National and regional award-winning journalist, photographer, and activist (Hanford, Spokane River, regional clean air issues, national nuclear weapons and waste policy). Former senior editor Camas Magazine, former client and communications director, Center for Justice, Spokane.
Helen being Helen, it was just impossible for her to let a guy have the last word in a spat, even if it was a playful joust, even if the guy was fifty years older.
“You devil!” she said, folding her reading glasses atop the Travel section of the Sentinal-Journal and briskly retreating inside, to change from the red bikini into the souvenir Brewers jersey that an old boyfriend had given her. It was white, with the gold and blue numeral 20 on it, with “Thomas” across the back, as in Gorman Thomas, the belovedly-bearded former center fielder and home run king.
It was the third of May, blue and unseasonably warm, such that Murray was down to his t-shirt, yanking on dandelions, preparing to put in more strawberries.
Helen was wearing a red bikini beneath her silk, Japanese bathrobe, using her reading glasses, working her way through the Sunday paper and applying a tall glass of lemonade as a paperweight.
It was only in the last year of his life that Murray began to hint, to Helen, that there’d been this other life.
For a decade and a half she’d only known him as her grandfatherly next door neighbor, a lanky man with wispy white hair. He wore a canvas, bucket hat in summer and, in winter, he favored an old Green Bay Packers knit cap that he often wore with a purple Northwestern jacket.
A new dispute over Use of Force investigations highlights a growing rift between Spokane police and Ombudsman Tim Burns.
By Tim Connor
Attached to Spokane Police Ombudsman Tim Burns’s report for the month of June is a rather astounding artifact.
It’s a July 14th letter to Burns from Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub about a central issue in the now six-and-a-half year effort to reform the Spokane Police Department.
It has to do with this question: How committed and capable is the SPD in investigating Use of Force complaints against its police officers?
