- Lael Henterly
- The memorial at the center of the alleged crime.
“I haven’t seen this many attorneys in one room since the OJ trial,” joked one of the defense attorneys as they hung their trench coats up on the coatrack. There are indeed a lot of lawyers at this trial, and a lot of defendants, too: Robert Howell, Scott Bullene, and Mia Jarvinen, all of them accused of malicious harassment in a March 15 attack on homeless people congregating around a statue in Pioneer Square. There are a lot of alleged victims as well—at least three—and a lot of accusations.
On Thursday, December 4, all three defendants got to tell their sides of the sordid story.
Things kicked off with the prosecution’s cross-examination of Howell, one of the two former firefighters accused of attacking the group of homeless people in Occidental Park on March 15. In his testimony the previous day, Howell had claimed he was actually the one who was attacked.
“You were the victim of a stranger assault?” asked Assistant City Prosecutor Joe Everett, his tone incredulous. “You were assaulted by a stranger you never met before?”
“Yes,” said Howell, looking furtively up and to the right and guzzling water from a plastic cup.
Next up, Bullene, the other former firefighter on trial. When he took the stand, he was eager to stress his compassion for the homeless and his years of public service. (Howell had been eager to make similar points when he first took the stand.) Bullene started as a volunteer firefighter and worked his way up, fighting wildfires, structure fires, and trash fires along the way. He also helped with a lot of other emergencies, many involving homeless people. He let a homeless and drug-addicted relative live with him for a year. He helped homeless people he didn’t know with everything from foot sores to tuberculosis.
Bullene said he doesn’t quite share Howell’s intense reverence for the Fallen Firefighters Memorial. (Howell had earlier told the court that before the incident, he’d seen a homeless man urinating on the memorial, found it “hugely disappointing,” and told the man to “knock it off.”) Bullene said of the memorial: “I care about the names.”
But he acknowledged that the memorial is “in a public park,” and said he’s seen skateboarders grind on it and clothing hung from it. It wouldn’t be unheard of, he said, for someone to urinate on it.
On March 15, Bullene didn’t even bother to look at the memorial when he walked by with Howell and Jarvinen on their way home from a Seattle Sounders game.
He testified that he was about 30 feet—the length of a fire hose—beyond the memorial, ahead of Howell and Jarvinen, when he heard a scuffle and turned to looked back. As he told the court, that’s when he saw a group of would-be attackers headed in the direction of his girlfriend, Jarvinen, and Howell.
“They weren’t gathering, they were, like, running and taking their backpacks off,” said Bullene. “Coming from the chess area, and where the totem poles are, and coming towards where we were.”
Everett, the prosecutor, jumped on this point and tried to clarify who was where in relation to one another and various landmarks in Occidental Park.
Bullene grew increasingly flustered, gesturing with his hands and pointing to a diagram depicting the park. The focus kept returning to Bullene’s alleged distance from Howell and Jarvinen at the time the scuffle ensued.
“You were 30 feet ahead?” Everett asked, over and over. “You guys were having a good time, you hadn’t had an argument or anything like that?”
They hadn’t, Bullene assured him. They were walking dynamically, he explained—together, then apart, then together.
Bullene was adamant that he wasn’t drunk, though he admitted he had downed five pints of craft beer. An IPA or two, maybe some other varieties. But he wasn’t drunk, wasn’t buzzed, and definitely wasn’t impaired by the alcohol, he said.
Everett didn’t seem to buy Bullene’s story about acting in self-defense during the incident, and kept asking pseudo-questions like: “You wrestled the stick away from him and then you beat him into submission?” (Bullene’s answer: “No!”)
He left the stand looking seriously shaken.
Jarvinen took the stand next, clutching a box of tissues. Originally from Finland, she moved to Seattle in 2010 to work in finance at Amazon. She lives on Capitol Hill and has been dating Bullene for the last four and a half years. She hadn’t spent much time in Pioneer Square prior to that fateful day in March.
The only thing she really knew about Pioneer Square was that it was home to the Fallen Firefighters Memorial.
“I knew it was in memory of—,” said Jarvinen, dissolving into tears. “There was a warehouse fire. Four or five firefighters died.”
Jarvinen said she sees homeless people every day. Chats with them, even. “About the weather, the bus, what time it’s going to come, everyday stuff,” she said.
How did the news stories depicting her as insensitive to homeless people make her feel?
“Terrible!” said Jarvinen.
Jarvinen painted a far clearer picture than Bullene of how the events unfolded that evening.
“I saw four or five people on the memorial partying or hanging out,” she said. She did not see anyone drinking or peeing on the memorial.
“I recall seeing men with a pipe that looked to me like a crack pipe,” she said, explaining that she lived in Amsterdam for a while and saw a lot of drug use there—enough to recognize a crack pipe, though she admitted the pipe could have been for something else.
Were the alleged partiers homeless?
“No, normal, casually dressed people,” she said. Jarvinen said Howell approached the people on the memorial and requested they refrain from disrespecting the memorial and thereby his firefighting brethren.
“The people on the memorial were like, ‘You can’t tell us to leave, this is our spot,'” Jarvinen said. “They provoked Mr. Howell, one of the—”
She broke down in tears again at that point and reached for a tissue before regaining her composure and continuing. “One of the people tried to demonstrate a sexual act with the statue—humping, I think is the term. Mr. Howell didn’t appreciate that.”
This led to an “interaction” back and forth with the partiers, Jarvinen said. Pushing. Shoving. Insults began to fly.
The melee moved into the park, leaving one man lying at the base of the memorial, apparently asleep.
“I kind of tried to convince him to leave after I got him awake,” said Jarvinen. “He was like, ‘I can sleep wherever the fuck I want.'”
She told him: “It’s disrespectful for firefighters that you’re laying down here.”
In her recollection, he replied that he didn’t give a shit about the firefighters. In response, she testified, she started yelling at him and kicked his belongings.
Eventually, Jarvinen said, the man realized she was serious and left. She does not believe the man was Simon McDonald, who testified earlier in the trial that Jarvinen kicked him.
When the trial resumes this morning, Jarvinen will be cross-examined by Everett.
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