When Seattle police were called about a shooting on a leafy, back-end street in the upscale neighborhood of Leschi one evening this past July, they arrived to find a grisly scene. An 18-year-old named Aaron Sullivan was slumped in the driver's seat of an old blue Chevy Caprice, surrounded by blood and what the police described as "cranial matter." A bullet had come through the shattered rear window.
Kyle Webster
Aaron Sullivan’s mother says he lived “big” for a not-very-big guy.
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As police mobilized a SWAT operation to deal with an armed suspect at large, detectives pulled aside the two other people in the car—Sullivan's girlfriend, Mariah Gill-Erhart, and a second friend, Grayson "Gray" Wessel—for questioning.
What set are you from? What set is Aaron from? Those were some of the first questions out of their mouths, Gill-Erhart recalls. "I kept having to repeat myself," she says. "We weren't in a gang. We didn't have any weapons." After being shot at, trying to hold her dying boyfriend's head together, and seeing "everything go so slow and so fast at the same time," she desperately needed a cigarette. When she started heading to a neighbor's house to borrow a lighter, a detective barked Get back in the car. I'm not done with you, she says. "They were aggressive. Too aggressive in that situation."
"We weren't treated at all like witnesses or friends of the deceased," says Wessel. "It was more of an interrogation."
In the murder's aftermath, law enforcement's behavior became a heated subject of coversation among Sullivan's family and friends and members of the city's African-American community. Sullivan was biracial, and his mother, Debra, is African-American. As dozens of people congregated at Debra Sullivan's house in the days following the shooting, and at two vigils held on Aaron's behalf in subsequent weeks, they discussed what they saw as the insulting assumption that Sullivan and his friends were gang members.
Resentments in the case were fueled by the fact that the murder took place the very same week as the brutal attack on a white female couple in South Park—a crime that received extraordinary public attention. The suspect in that case was a young black man, whose image was widely circulated in the media as police sought—successfully—to apprehend him. He's been charged with aggravated first-degree murder. In the view of the Sullivan family and others, the murder in Leschi seemed to get a very different reception. For one thing, the image of Sullivan's alleged murderer—19-year-old Tristan Appleberry, who is white—has never appeared in newspapers or on TV. (Until now: Seattle Weekly obtained his photo from the school district.)
Appleberry was caught the day after the crime. But the judge at his arraignment didn't allow photographs. Defense attorneys will often argue for the prohibition, saying that photos of the defendant would taint witnesses. The Seattle Medium, a newspaper that serves an African-American audience, ran a story suggesting that in this case the real reason was a "hush campaign by the authorities and the media" with regard to Appleberry's race. The front-page headline: "Black Youth Killed by White Male."
Dawn Mason, a Rainier Valley activist, former state legislator, and friend of the Sullivan family, says she has been asking people whether they realize Sullivan's shooter is white. "Why is that important to know? Because it's unusual," she says, and because people would assume otherwise unless told. To some members of the community, publicizing this as a white-on-black case seemed only fair after so many degrading stories about violent African-American men.
"No one [in the media] seemed to treat Aaron with the same degree of attention and respect that's given to a lot of other shooting victims," says Tuere Sala, Debra Sullivan's sister. "But you have articles and articles about some black kid that goes crazy and kills a woman in South Park." The Sullivan case followed what's been perceived as a history of scant attention paid by the press to violence against blacks, much of which is not deemed noteworthy because of presumed gang involvement.
"It's not clear to the general public that this is anything except some drug-related, gang-related, black-on-black thing," said Sullivan's mother, in an interview with Seattle Weekly a month after the murder. She was horrified at some of the reader comments posted to news stories about the case, such as one that said the only way to stop gun violence was to "stop living the life."
"It just brings up all the old issues we have in this country about disparity," says Harriett Walden, director of Mothers for Police Accountability, a group that monitors law-enforcement abuse. "Black men have always paid the price for harming white people." In this case, Walden and others say, the white suspect is not paying the price—either in the media or at the hands of the King County Prosecutor's office, which charged Appleberry with murder in the second degree. "Had it been a case of an African American that had shot a white person," she says she told King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg at a forum on public safety, "we believe the charges would have been different."
