Denny's Dark Cinema/Downtown/Wed Feb 13/11:38 pm: Late this morning, a man opened the front door of a downtown Denny's restaurant, popped his head inside the restaurant, and aimed a silver video camera at a cashier who was ringing up a guest's check. "You got a bullet comin', mister," said the cameraman to his subject, adding, "Nice haircut," as he closed the door. From the window, the Denny's employee watched the cameraman film the restaurant from the parking lot. The cameraman then walked to a dark van and sped away. "I don't know the guy," the Denny's employee later told the reporting officer, J. Garner. "But I think he is a friend of a frequent customer called John the Do-Gooder... [John] comes into the restaurant and pays for [the] coffee and meals of transients who do not have money enough to pay." John the Do-Gooder, he further explained, also harasses employees about money matters, and he suspects that the cameraman who threatened him was an associate of John the Do-Gooder.

This disturbing video incident occurred only two weeks after another employee, working in a Denny's located in Kirkland, witnessed a man pull out a handgun and shoot himself in the head after drinking coffee with a friend. "There had been no threat of suicide, not even a hint of it," police spokesperson Lt. Bill Hamilton told the Seattle P-I (Jan 29, 2002). "His friend had just gotten up and gone outside when the victim shot himself in the head." The suspect/victim was single, 40, a Bellevue resident, unemployed, and looking for a job. He had a "normal conversation" with his friend before blasting his being into oblivion.

Blooming Crime/Capitol Hill/Thurs Feb 14/1:03 pm: Today, an employee of Blooms On Broadway observed about five black males standing in front of a large display of roses outside of the shop. Suddenly, the black men picked up two buckets of roses and a large bag of rose petals and ran westbound on E Republican St. The flower shop employee dropped everything he was doing and pursued the flower thieves. The thieves ran southbound on Harvard, then westbound on E Harrison, where they dropped one of the buckets. (Red roses covered the sidewalk.) At around Belmont Ave E, the flower thieves jumped into a white Dodge Caravan and fled southbound on E Denny Way. "[The flower store] employee," reports Officer Mahoney, "said that the driver of the vehicle was waiting for the [flower thieves] and appeared to be coordinating their action using Nextel radio phones. An area check for the vehicle was negative."