A gray-haired, 68-year-old woman digs through family photos as a rerun of Murder, She Wrote flickers on a TV in her Central District living room. Most of the photos were destroyed a few years ago when her basement flooded, and those that remain are crammed in a white, plastic shopping bag and a shoebox.
Laura Onstot
McMichael was a fixture outside Seattle sporting events.
Jonathan Walczak
Chambers maintains his innocence, claiming the police are out to get him.
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It's cloudy outside, and she squints as she pulls out a football trading card. On the front, her grandson, an 8-year-old with a clenched smile and beady eyes, looks into the camera. The back of the card, printed in 2001, says he's 4´9 and weighs only 80 pounds.
Seven years later, the boy, Billy Chambers, would help kill Seattle's beloved Tuba Man, Ed McMichael, 53, known for his funky hats and for playing tunes on the sidewalk in front of local sporting and arts events.
McMichael grew up in Wallingford, supported by loving parents and a vibrant church youth group. His mother pushed him to play music, and at a young age, the shy boy turned inward, befriending the piano, then the tuba, the instrument that would one day earn him national acclaim.
Chambers was raised by his grandmother, Margaret Harris, a receptionist with DKNY glasses and a hearty laugh. His dad was perpetually in trouble with the law, and his mother left sometime around his fourth birthday.
"It wasn't as if his mother couldn't be there—she wouldn't be," Harris says. "She didn't want to."
The fates of McMichael and Chambers tangled near Fifth Avenue and Mercer Street around midnight on Oct. 25, 2008, when Chambers, 15 at the time, and four other teens robbed and attacked McMichael as he crossed the street toward the group. The teens, who had just left a dance at Seattle Center, circled him and rained down a series of blows and kicks, robbing him as he tried to shield himself, even slipping a ring off his finger. Initially, he survived the attack. But on November 3 he died.
What followed was an outpouring of public outrage: both at the killing of a gentle, vulnerable man, swarmed upon and beaten as he lay in a fetal position on the ground, and the minimal 18-month sentence given to Chambers, who's been in and out of trouble ever since.
The case pushed important questions normally debated in the insular juvenile-justice community into the public arena: When is it too late to rehabilitate a child criminal, and when is it time to crack down in the interest of public safety?
Juvenile advocates say that because the brains of young offenders are still developing, they are very receptive to rehabilitation. Though a barrage of research supports that assertion, cases like Chambers' rile the public and seem to indicate otherwise, says Gavin Thornton, an attorney with the nonprofit Columbia Legal Services. "The compulsion to respond to stories like Chambers' and other horror stories we hear is so strong, and it's so hard to respond with a reasoned, thoughtful, logical approach, instead of that visceral 'Justice has to be served here' response," he says.
To show that rehabilitation works for even the most hardened young criminals, Thornton and others invoke the case of Starcia Ague, a 24-year-old who, with three friends, participated in a violent home invasion when she was 15. Ague was a cynical and belligerent girl before she spent the remainder of her childhood in state juvenile facilities. Since then, she's become a public-relations coup for youth advocates, turning her life around, earning a pardon, and completing college—in the process becoming one of the leading voices regarding the state juvenile-justice system.
Juvenile advocates, to whom Ague is something of a exalted figure, are gearing up for a fight in the next legislative session with their more hard-line opponents over a policy called automatic declination, or auto-decline, which sends all 16- and 17-year-olds charged with serious crimes, regardless of their background or circumstances, to the adult system. Last year, Mary Lou Dickerson, a Democratic state representative from Seattle, introduced a bill that would get rid of auto-decline. While it didn't make it far past committee, she plans to make a major push in the next legislative session to pass it into law.
"There's a chance that it can pass," Dickerson says. "I think, though, that we have to do a lot more education on the subject."
On June 23, a young pregnant woman driving in the Central District looked in her rear-view mirror and saw Chambers speeding toward her in a mid-'90s black Crown Victoria. A week earlier, she had reported him to police for breaking into her car.
When she stopped at a red light, Chambers rammed the back of her vehicle. Both cars sped up as the light turned green, weaving in and out of traffic on 23rd Avenue. As they zoomed ahead, Chambers again swerved into the woman, causing her to lose control, spin off the road, and hit a retaining wall.
He fled to his grandmother's house, where police, when they arrived, caught the end of a phone conversation in which he was asking someone to "please tell them you did it."
Investigators, however, had to deal with an uncooperative victim, who put her head down when asked to provide a written statement. Thankfully, they found other witnesses.
