Rather than being congratulated for bravery on that summer day two years ago, Hennick found himself arrested for felony theft. The victim had fingered him as the crook, and the police, claiming he had confessed to the crime, took him to jail, where he spent two days before being released. Hennick wasn't charged until almost a year later, and was finally exonerated last November after a witness came forward and declared Hennick innocent.
Last week, Hennick filed suit against the arresting cop, Officer Christopher Bowling, for defamation of character. He's seeking financial damages and a bit of sweet revenge.
* * *
Down at his metal shop by the train tracks in Interbay, Hennick is grilling spicy bananas on a home-made gas grill with a water-cooling system he designed and patented. He's surrounded by maps, photographs, metal shavings, tools, and inventions. He points to a home-made dirt bike, explains his grill, and shows off a portfolio of pieces he has created for homes, community centers, and parks around Seattle. His grin seems almost permanent as he talks of his work and his hobby of piloting gliders, but when the subject of the purse theft comes up, he turns glum.
He remembers being lured to the Pike Place Market security office on the day of the snatching; a short time earlier he had come by the office checking for his lost glasses. Officer Bowling showed up and began referring to him as the suspect. "A few minutes later," Hennick says, "they informed me that I was being arrested. They cuffed me and dragged me off and put me in a cop car and took me to jail."
According to Hennick and his attorney Brady Johnson--the civil rights lawyer who, in 1997, won a prominent case against a King County deputy prosecutor who had lied in a criminal case--the arresting officer treated Hennick as if he were guilty until proven innocent and performed a shoddy investigation. No eye-witnesses were sought, and Bowling didn't dust the purse for fingerprints. When contacted by The Stranger, the Seattle Police Department had no comment on the case.
The worst part, however, was the falsified confession. Though Hennick passed two separate polygraph tests--one conducted by the SPD, the other by a private polygraph service--Bowling claimed in two separate reports that Hennick had confessed to the theft and had passed the purse off to a partner.
"That's a total fabrication," says Hennick, who theorizes that the police may have treated him poorly because of the way he looked. On the day in question, he was working on three separate projects at once, and was "wearing grubby blue jeans and tennis shoes that were three months beyond the point when I should have thrown them away," he recalls. "I was wearing an acid-soaked shirt with holes, and I had about nine days of beard on my face and I needed a haircut.... I looked like a down-and-out street person, a homeless guy."
Unlike a homeless guy, however, Hennick has the resources to pay $20,000 in legal fees to fight back. Of course, that won't undo the felony arrest record he'll be stuck with for the rest of his life. And his friends say he's become guarded and less generous. "He's become slightly paranoid," says Kate Wade, who buys art from Hennick and has known him for a decade. "He'll never be as trusting as he used to be."
"I don't think that there was a conspiracy," Hennick says. "But this horseshit about fabricating a statement and a confession because [Bowling] didn't have enough to send me up the creek, that's why I'm suing him.... We cannot allow cops to turn on us like that."
