From the May 8 – May 14, 2003 issue

News

City of Destiny

Tacoma Police Chief David Brame didn't just murder his wife and kill himself. He brought Tacoma face to face with its true self.

by Charles Mudede

Late last year, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that attempted to explain why John Allen Muhammad and his Jamaican sidekick, Lee Boyd Malvo, were able to engage in target practice with a high-powered rifle in the backyard of a dense Tacoma neighborhood without attracting the sustained attention of the police.

According to the Seattle Times, a few neighbors had heard the gunshots and called 911 to complain, but the police only investigated the complaints once, and nothing came of it. Eight months later, of course, federal law enforcement agents, with the assistance of the Tacoma Fire Department, were in that backyard pulling a tree stump out of the ground. They suspected that the Beltway snipers had used the stump for target practice. How, I wrote, could anyone use a high-powered rifle for target practice in a packed urban area and not raise considerable alarm? Two factors made it possible: one, the presence of military bases and the culture they represented; two, an enduring frontier mentality that haunts not only Tacoma but, to varying degrees, all cities on the West Coast.

My article caused nothing short of an emotional thunderstorm in Tacoma. I received numerous e-mails denouncing my article as incorrect and slanderous. A man who had lived in Tacoma for 14 years wrote that people in Tacoma didn't "engage in target practice in their backyards.... We aren't a bunch of cowbows [sic] and cretins without any sense of propriety." Another letter, written by someone who "was born and raised in Tacoma," said, "The only thing correct about [Mudede's] story was his spelling of 'Tacoma.'" I even received a thinly veiled death threat: "I urge you to be very careful when you return to PLU to teach again. It is located on the outskirts of Tacoma, where all of those dark, dark woods are." (I occasionally teach creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.)

Not only did I receive angry e-mails, but the columnists and reporters for Tacoma's News Tribune went apeshit over what Kathleen Merryman, the paper's crime/breaking news columnist, called my "infamous article." Columnist Peter Callaghan was my harshest and most dedicated critic. He wrote several scathing articles: My favorite, from Oct 29, 2002, entitled "Dark and Stormy Tacoma Draws Glare of National Media," shredded not only my New York Times op-ed but also a Stranger article I had written in 2000 about the long and sour rivalry between Tacoma and Seattle ["How Tacoma Fought Seattle for the Future And Lost," Aug 10]. On Nov 2, 2002, Merryman (my least favorite opponent at the News Tribune) called me a "pseudo-academic opportunist of the shoddiest sort."

There were also letters to the editor of the News Tribune, and to the New York Times, one of which came from none other than Tacoma's mayor, Bill Baarsma:

The Tacoma... that Charles T. Mudede describes in "Gunfire at Night in a Military Town" (Op-Ed, Oct. 26) is not the Tacoma I know and love.

John Muhammad, the accused Beltway sniper, did live for a time in Tacoma. He served in the military, but he clearly suffered from many personal and professional struggles. Tacoma appreciates the close ties created over the last 85 years with Fort Lewis and nearby McChord Air Force Base. I was born and raised in Tacoma and have lived here most of my life. Yet I've heard no gunshots in the night.

This summer you profiled the Tacoma I know and love when we opened the Museum of Glass: International Center of Contemporary Art (Arts & Leisure, July 21). You cited the restored Union Station Federal Courthouse, the Washington State History Museum, the University of Washington's new campus and the new Tacoma Art Museum as evidence that Tacoma is a city on the move, not an untamed backwoods community. Those are Tacoma's true stories.

Bill Baarsma, Mayor, Tacoma, Wash., Oct. 30, 2002

I did not expect Tacoma to respond so strongly to my article. I honestly thought that my points were simply common knowledge and that the city had long since come to terms with its image, its history, its advantages and disadvantages. If Tacoma is not a working-class, multiracial, military town with frontier predilections, then what the hell is it? All of the letters kept saying that I didn't know Tacoma, but none offered a credible alternative vision of the city. Almost all made the astounding assertion that the city was a cultural center, as exemplified by its new art museums and restored architecture. Tacoma may be many things, Mayor Baarsma, but it's not Athens. Besides, why all the fuss about art and history museums anyway? I much prefer military air shows, with their roaring jets, to the glass art by Dale Chihuly.

Tacoma, it seems, still wants to be what it has tried to become since the late 19th century, when a civic booster dubbed it the City of Destiny: the cultural and financial center of the Pacific Northwest. That honor eventually went to Seattle, but whereas once-competing financial and trading centers like Portland, Spokane, and Everett have accepted their fate, Tacoma has not. As evidenced by the heated rivalry between Tacoma's and Seattle's ports, the race to become the biggest and best in the Northwest is not over for Tacoma. This is precisely why Police Chief David Brame's murder of his wife and his suicide have been so painful for the city; the tragedy represents the second big setback to the city's big-time dreams in less than a year's time. "[With] the city's recent string of sad and bad events," wrote a very somber Jen Graves in the News Tribune, the day after the Tacoma Art Museum opened on May 2, and a week after Crystal Brame was fatally wounded by the city's police chief, "[the Tacoma Art Museum] was a triumph for a city that--historically and lately--no doubt sometimes feels it can't win."

Tacoma is mourning for two reasons: one, because of the sheer horror of the shootings (both headshots), which orphaned two children (who were forced to witness the shootings); two, because it brought to a sudden halt all claims that Tacoma is a city "on the move," as Mayor Baarsma asserted in his letter to the New York Times.

Returning to the mailbag, I received the following from an unidentified Tacoma resident after my op-ed appeared: "In his piece, Mr. Mudede blames the streets of Tacoma for producing the D.C. sniper. I would first point out that the sniper Muhammad moved here because of the Army--he was not RAISED here." Granted, John Allen Muhammad was not a "native son"--he was a homeless good-for-nothing. Police Chief David Brame, on the other hand, was, like Tacoma's mayor, born and raised in Tacoma. He was part of the city's elite professional class. His father was on Tacoma's police force, as were his brother and cousin. The malls and chainstores of Tacoma produced Brame, and he was not a good person. Brame had serious problems that were overlooked, denied, and even defended by his colleagues. "While Tacoma's population of nearly 195,000 makes it Washington's third-largest city," wrote the Associated Press, "it retains a small-town feeling. That clubbiness... contributed to Brame's unchecked rise to power" (May 5).

In the week after the shooting, more and more information came out about Brame's unprofessional relationships with Catherine Woodard (Tacoma's deputy police chief) and Patrick Frantz (president of the city's police union). Woodard may have helped to intimidate Brame's terrorized wife (Crystal Brame accused her of doing just that in a taped 911 call); for his part, Frantz, in an e-mail, threatened John Hathaway, the writer who broke the story of Crystal Brame's abuse allegation on the Internet. Soon, the closed world of Tacoma government and law enforcement began to feel more "deeply corrupt" than "small-town," and the negative impact of my piece faded into irrelevance. No writer could possibly do a better job indicting the City of Destiny than its own elites have done.

Tacoma, however, is still a great city. I never suggested it was anything else. But the city will continue to suffer these kinds of shocks and embarrassments if it believes that art galleries and classical music concerts will "improve its image." The city should drop all of its dull middle-class aspirations and promote the extraordinary life that teems on its streets and fills its bars, casinos, and girlie joints. Tacoma should take inspiration from those things that make it unique, and stop attempting to become something it is not. The Pacific Northwest doesn't need another boring, safe, and middlebrow city that fancies itself "cultured." It's already got Seattle.

charles@thestranger.com