Sometime in September of last year, a man died inside a tent in the woods of Beacon Hill. He was 59 years old, and his body wasn’t discovered for months. When it was discovered, the body was in a state of decomposition, and the head was not attached to the rest of the body. After the discovery of the body was reported to the police, this man’s apparently lonely death became a political football.
This is a twisting story involving gruesome facts, online accusations of a cover-up, a conservative city council candidate spinning the material into election fodder, a saw that either did or did not have blood on it, and a Stranger writer who carelessly summarized a police Tweet.
Acting on a tip, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) discovered the man’s body on February 16 of this year, but the death didn’t become public until a month later, when news broke on the popular conservative Facebook group Safe Seattle that SPD was covering up a gruesome beheading in a homeless encampment.
The March 9 post warned that “a homeless guy got his head cut off at a park trail… The body was decomposing inside the tent and there was a bloody saw next to it. Very brutal… Possibly a drug related murder. Haven’t found out who did it yet, but the person is on the loose in another camp I’m sure.”
This frightening post was shared on Facebook almost 300 times, including by city council candidate Ari Hoffman, a frontrunner at the time for District 2, which includes the area where the body was found. Hoffman shared the Safe Seattle post in a post of his own, which has since been deleted, that included a warning that the situation was “Very scary and right behind the QFC on Rainier Ave.” The apparent beheading fit in with Hoffman’s campaign theme, which centered on his belief that the city’s lax policies on homeless camping were endangering the entire city.
SPD responded to the viral social media story by posting on Twitter two days later that they were investigating a death near the location Safe Seattle had identified, but that the case was not currently being considered a homicide. SPD spokesperson Sean Whitcomb also went on a local conservative radio show to dispel the rumors that there was an SPD cover-up of a murder. He wouldn’t give any details about the dead body or whether or not the person had been decapitated, but he reiterated that “we are not investigating it as a crime.”
In other words, a local conservative social media group and a conservative political candidate had seized on this person’s death to make a broader political point about the city—only to have the SPD refute essential aspects of their story, particularly Safe Seattle’s assertion that there was a murderer on the loose decapitating people in homeless encampments.
Then the left seized the moment.
Not wanting to miss a chance to criticize a conservative, the left turned Hoffman’s sharing of false news into a talking point. That included me. In my weekly roundup of city council election news, I included an item titled “Ari Hoffman shares fake beheading news” that explained how Hoffman shared the post only to have SPD refute some of the information. I wrote, “SPD clarified on Monday that they had not seen any evidence of the beheading, but that wasn’t before Hoffman shared the Facebook post from his campaign.”
That was sloppy writing on my part, based on an assumption. Even though it is true that Hoffman shared fake news (there was no confirmed evidence a murderer was on the loose), I implied that because there wasn’t a homicide investigation there probably wasn’t a headless body to begin with. A good reporter leaves all conceivable outcomes on the table until the facts present themselves, so I should have said, “Maybe there was a headless body in the woods, but SPD isn’t saying there are signs of foul play. So that head could have been removed from that body through non-murderous circumstances—for instance, natural decomposition.” Instead, I jumped at the chance to say a bunch of conservatives were wrong about everything.
That turned out to not be entirely true, either.
Seven months after I wrote that news item, someone in the Safe Seattle group acquired a copy of the incident’s police report through a public records request. On Tuesday of this week, Hoffman shared the police report on his own Facebook page. According to the report, a man who was camping in the woods near Beacon Hill discovered the deceased body and called the police on February 16. The cops responded and found a gruesome scene. Here’s how the officer described it:
I observed a head lying underneath a tree approximately 25 feet away from a tent. I was unable to recognize if the head was male or female due to the level of decomposition…
I entered the tent and observed a decapitated body lying on a makeshift bed inside of the tent. The body was in advanced stages of decomposition. I also observed a bow saw lying in the tent with what appeared to be dried blood on the blade.
Hoffman, who lost in the August city council primary, seized on the news that there was a decapitated person and an apparently bloody saw to celebrate what he considers his vindication.
Here’s what he said on Facebook when he released the report on Tuesday:
In March Safe Seattle ran a story from a tipster alleging a beheading in a homeless encampment in D2. I was concerned about it since there was an uptick in gang violence from MS-13 and there had been other stories about beheadings elsewhere, so I shared the Safe Seattle piece. Almost immediately, I was called a liar and accused of ‘demonizing the homeless’—The Stranger, Erica C. Barnett, South Seattle Emerald, Seattle Patch (AKA Neal McNamara who lives in MA) all ran stories echoing the same…
Safe Seattle unlike those other outlets and ‘journalists’ did their research and obtained a copy of the original police report…
A decapitated body WAS found where the tipster told Safe Seattle it was. The police incident number the tipster gave them was correct, and everyone else was wrong.
However, this story does not end with Hoffman telling SPD and The Stranger that he was right and everyone else was wrong. I followed up with SPD and the King County Medical Examiner this week and confirmed some additional details.
The medical examiner’s office was able to identify the individual as a 59-year-old male but they were unable to identify the cause or manner of death. The examiner estimates the man died on September 9, 2018. The Stranger is declining to release the name of the individual out of respect for his family. While the police did find a decapitated person, the Medical Examiner was unable to establish how that person died, or how the head became separated from the body.
SPD has not found evidence that the 59-year-old man was decapitated by another person. Nor have they changed the case from a death investigation to a homicide investigation.
What about that bloody saw found next to the body? Apparently there was no blood, according to an SPD spokesperson.
“Investigators tested the saw that was initially believed to have blood on it, but it was not [blood]. It was rust.” The spokesperson reiterated, “Investigators have not found any signs of foul play at this point.”
So, to recap: A man’s body was found with the head not attached to it in a wooded area in Seattle, but there was no bloody saw and no evidence of foul play. Authorities so far have no reason to believe there is a murderer decapitating homeless people in Seattle.
When I shared this information with Hoffman yesterday, he declined to comment.
There’s still some mystery for the general public as to the specifics of how a man’s head can become separated from his body without any foul play occurring. Perhaps a wild animal is the culprit. Perhaps the culprit is decomposition plus gravity. The medical examiner may have their own theories, but a spokesperson for Public Health—King County, which oversees the medical examiner, declined to offer any explanation for the head being separate from the body. Autopsies in Washington state are private, their details released only to the deceased’s next of kin.
I’m not holding my breath for Hoffman or Safe Seattle to stop using this man’s death as a way to advance their political interests. Hoffman didn’t miss a chance to invoke MS-13 (a Latin American street gang) when sharing the police report this week. David Preston, who runs the Safe Seattle group, was throwing around accusations of a cover-up as recently as September, when he wrote this in a post after the medical examiner’s office declined to give him any information:
That investigation has now lasted more than six months, but it doesn’t take a medical examiner or forensics analysts that long to determine that someone died of natural causes and their head rotted off, so there must be something more to this story. In other words, there must be some evidence that foul play was involved. But even so, why keep the records sealed at this point? Nothing new is likely to turn up with the corpse?
One reason could be because the medical examiner’s report would show that the victim died a violent death (maybe even a beheading), but they don’t want to release that information because it would exonerate this page.
In other words, Safe Seattle’s theory is that the medical examiner cares about their Facebook page—where, again, Safe Seattle had asserted, without evidence, that this case was “possibly a drug related murder” and that the murderer “is on the loose in another camp I’m sure.” Pardon me while my eyes roll back in my head.
There could be future twists in this story, as always, if more information becomes available. The Stranger will wait to publish any new details until we can get verified information from trusted sources. Unlike Safe Seattle, we think it’s important to correct the record when we get things wrong.
