- ANNA MINARD
- Russell Smith, the man who Bellevue Police shot and killed, was living at this house with his brother at the time. It's still boarded up from police damage months later, say neighbors.
As you may recall, a Bellevue SWAT team, trying to serve a warrant on Smith at a Columbia City house on March 22, instead shot him dead in his car, then raided the house. The police said they feared he'd drive over them trying to flee and thought more suspects were inside; the street's residents were up in arms at the violence and the ensuing hours-long police response that kept them hostage in their homes.
Pressing police for answers, neighbors were told repeatedly that all the details they sought would come out in an eventual inquest. Now, as soon as a judge schedules it, that process can finally begin.
But there's another important step missing here. If the police departments had any interest in mending their relationship with this community, they would immediately repair the damage they did to Smith's brother's house that morning. Neighbors have been adamant all along that this is important to them, both for symbolic reasons and because it's the right thing to do. At an April 22 public meeting with residents and representatives from the Bellevue and Seattle police departments, moderator Genessa Krasnow said pointedly: "We need Russell Smith and Rydell Smith's house repaired. Tomorrow." To which BPD Chief Linda Pillo replied, "We have a process that we go through. I'm going to see what I can do to expedite that process. I hear you loud and clear."
"It's still not fixed," Krasnow tells me by phone today. They've submitted paperwork and gone back and forth with BPD, and they hope it'll happen eventually. But it's dispiriting for the whole neighborhood, she says, and it's a huge missed opportunity for the cops to make nice with the community, and it wouldn't cost them much. "When cops go in and bust shit up, which they do, there should be a team of cops that go in and repair it," says Krasnow. "Our neighbors would've come out and worked on that house with the Bellevue cops and the Seattle cops, I am 100 percent sure of that... And the house would be fixed." Or they could even just pay for repairs in a timely way.
For now, it's summer, and the many kids on the small, dead-end street are playing outside all the time, in front of the still-wrecked house.
