MONDAY, APRIL 7 This week of haunted hearts, mysterious arguments,
and impassioned Blue Oyster Cult group-sings kicks off with
Seattle Public Schools, which today announced it will
pay $3 million in settlements after
failing to act on dozens of warnings that a popular elementary-school
teacher was sexually molesting his students. Details come from the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which reports that 58-year-old
Laurence E. “Shayne” Hill, a fifth-grade teacher at
North Seattle’s Broadview-Thomson Elementary School, has a full two
decades of sexually inappropriate behavior under his belt, complete
with eyewitnesses. In addition to the 30 official reports made by
teachers and staff members to school administrators about Hill’s
longstanding habit of fondling female students, school employees said
in depositions that they observed “hundreds of incidents of Hill’s
sexually inappropriate behavior” with girls since the mid-1980s. On at
least two occasions, principals warned Hill to maintain “appropriate
physical boundaries” with his students, but no administrator or teacher
ever reported the complaints to police or to Child Protective
Services—which is required by law—and Hill wasn’t placed on
administrative leave until April 2005, when a mother caught him in the
act of fondling her daughter. In December 2005, Hill pleaded guilty to
two counts of child molestation and was sentenced to five and a half
years in prison. Which brings us to the $3 million
settlement, approved today in King County Superior Court,
acknowledging the school district’s negligence in protecting students
from a well-documented child molester. One of Hill’s
victims—identified by the P-I as the “most abused
girl”—will receive $2.5 million, another will
receive $300,000, and the mother of the first girl
(who’s undergone counseling for anxiety, depression, and suicide
attempts) will receive $250,000. “[The school] did
nothing,” said Ron Bemis, a lawyer for the two girls. “In effect, they
protected a popular teacher at the expense of 10- and 11-year-old
girls.”
TUESDAY, APRIL 8 The week continues with a deeply freaky story out
of Hilton Head, South Carolina, where our saga began
12 years ago, when Sonny Graham, then a 57-year-old on
the verge of congestive heart failure, got a call that a heart was
available for transplant. The source of the heart: Terry Cottle, a
33-year-old Charleston man who’d fatally shot himself.
After the successful placement of Cottle’s heart in Graham’s body, the
Associated Press reports, Graham began writing grateful letters to
Cottle’s family. In 1997, Graham met his donor’s widow, 28-year-old
Cheryl Cottle. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her,” said Graham to the
Hilton Head Island Packet in 2006. “I felt like I had known
her for years.” In 2004, Graham and Cheryl Cottle
married, and today, 69-year-old Graham followed his
heart to its original end: fatally shooting himself in
a shed behind his house. As someone once said, you can take the heart
out of the suicide, but you can’t take the suicide out of the
heart.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9 In worse news: We continue with the saga of
Dawn Leamon, the U.S. woman (and mother of two
active-duty soldiers) who today told members of Congress of her
brutal rape while working for the U.S. contractor
KBR in Iraq. As Leamon told the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations, she was working as a contracted paramedic in Iraq
when she was raped by a U.S. soldier and a KBR colleague. Further
details come from ABC News: After reporting the attack to the KBR
Employee Assistance Program, Leamon said she was discouraged from
taking any further action and assigned full-time security
guards, which gave her no privacy to talk about the incident
to anyone. Like Jamie Leigh Jones, the young Texan
woman who also says she was gang-raped while working for KBR in Iraq,
Leamon believes she was drugged before her attack; as with Jones, no
charges have been filed in Leamon’s case. However, as ABC News reports,
“the Justice Department has agreed to send a representative to the
Senate hearing entitled ‘Closing Legal Loopholes: Justice for Americans
Sexually Assaulted in Iraq and Afghanistan.'” Stay tuned.
THURSDAY, APRIL 10 Nothing happened today, unless you count American
Airlines’ second day of airport hell, a four-day
extravaganza that will see the cancellation of 3,300 flights before
things get back to normal on Sunday.
FRIDAY, APRIL 11 The week continues with an extraordinarily seedy
tale out of Burien, Washington, where a
15-year-old girl was arrested today on suspicion of
fatally stabbing a 49-year-old man who’d hired her as
a prostitute. Details come from the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, which reports the fatally stabbed john was
found dead in his garage on April 4, with a steak knife in his chest.
As for the girl: She told police the victim had arranged to pay her
$120 for sex, but after spending a few hours with him, she tried to
back out, after which came an argument and the alleged stabbing. The
young woman has been arrested for investigation of homicide and is
being held at the King County Youth Service Center.
SATURDAY, APRIL 12 Today brings a beguiling eyewitness report and an
equally beguiling follow-up question from Hot Tipper
Skweetis. “Late last night in the parking lot on Second and
Virginia there was a low-grade domestic dispute between two girls and either a guy or a real butch dyke. It had a Three
Stooges flavor, where the guy/dyke would climb into the giant parked
truck, there would be a little tussle, and then he or she would get
kicked back out of the passenger-side door. Then there would be some
yelling and some throwing of things across the parking lot and the
cycle would repeat. Eventually, the girl in the driver’s seat yells,
‘When did I become Elisabeth Shue?!’ She was clearly
proud of the line and dissatisfied with her companions’ reactions
because she proceeded to repeat it in different configurations:
‘What am I, Elisabeth Shue?’ ‘Hey, I’m not Elisabeth Shue over
here!’ etc. My question is, what the hell does that
expression mean? And should I be incorporating this into my
vernacular? BTW, I’m not evil. It didn’t look like
anyone was really in any danger. Pretty mild by downtown, late-night
skirmish standards.” Dear Skweetis: Thank you for noticing and sharing.
As for your question, we put it to the people of Slog: To what
does the hollering lady’s Elisabeth Shue reference refer? From
the respondents: 49 percent said Shue’s experience taking care of two
obnoxious pubescents in Adventures in Babysitting, 39 percent
said Shue’s experience taking care of a suicidal drunk in Leaving
Las Vegas, 13 percent said her experience traveling through time
then being forcibly tranquilized in Back to the Future II, and
a significant number of write-in votes pitched Elisabeth’s “star turn
as Ralph Macchio’s loyal girlfriend in The Karate Kid,” a
scenario presumably casting the parking-lot brawlers as
karate-tournament finalists Daniel Larusso and “that evil Cobra Kai
blond fascist kid.”
SUNDAY, APRIL 13 Nothing happened today, unless you count Last Days’
inadvertent eavesdropping on the dozen or so people partaking in a
rambunctious group-sing of the Blue Oyster Cult
classic “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in a second-floor
residence near 18th Avenue and Union Street just after midnight.
(Insert “Insert ‘More Cowbell’ Joke Here” joke here.) 
Thanks and farewell to Dan Paulus, Last Days designer and master
caption-writer. Everyone else, send Hot Tips to lastdays@thestranger.com.
