The Letter/E-mail/Sat Jan 13/11:20 pm: Two weeks ago, Angela Valdez up and left Seattle, this paper, and the column I turned over to her two months ago. To mark my return to the Beat, I want to open with an e-mail I received a week before my column became Valdez's column. David Wagner wrote: "To Whom It May Concern: This is in reference to the article (in Police Beat on Mar 21–Mar 27, 2002) written about the time when I was a young laddy romping around in Gasworks Park with a Styrofoam carved, satirically created, grenade launcher ("AR-15"). I know I'm just short of 5 years late on my rebuttal to your piece, but I've given the archive a second look and decided that I need to respond to this obviously defamatory article because it really grinds my gears. In retrospect, what really pisses me off is that you referred to me as stupid when we were really just creating an amateur film on a sunny Seattle day. What is really stupid is when Seattle's finest deployed a team of 11 cop cars, a sniper team, and two helicopters with the intention of pumping 36 rounds into our brown bodies, as quoted by the policeman. We should have given it a second thought then, but I need to defend my intelligence simply by letting you know our side of the story. The blood hungry Seattle police force was looking for a sensationalized story to increase their pay grade and northwest notoriety, however, clearly didn't have anything better to do. Let me just remind you that every Washington state resident was on the tax paying, robin hood tip, and ya'll paid for me to swing around my form wand. Thank you greatly I was in like 10th grade, you retards."
The Report in Question
The Guns of Gas Works Park/Gas Works Park/Sun March 3, 2002/5:09 pm:
This afternoon, Officer Clark and his partner, Officer Maccarrone, were dispatched to Gas Works Park. As they pulled into the driveway of the park, they met a witness. The terrified witness, named Welcome, explained he saw two young men with guns: One had a pistol, the other a big gun. Welcome pointed out the suspects, who were in a covered structure near the park's entrance. They were in a shadowed area, and the cops could make out the outline of an AR-15 Carbine. Officer Clark called for backup; they had a potentially dangerous situation. Soon multiple police cars were en route to the park, and an airborne sniper from King County Guardian One was also on his way. Officer Macaroni (I mean Maccarrone) barred the entrance to the park. Suddenly the two young men (now recognized as teens) walked out of the structure with no guns in their hands, and informed the officers that they were doing a film project for school using toy weapons. Officer Macaroni informed the arriving, heavily armed cops of the new circumstances as Officer Clark admonished the boys for their stupidity. "I took their information and took the toy guns, and let them know that the toy guns would be placed into evidence."
This brown-bodied young man took five years to respond to my "obviously defamatory article." Now that is the stuff of Police Beat. 
