Outcast Among Outcasts

You want to make sense of the executions Saturday morning, March 25, on Capitol Hill, but there's a nagging contradiction. Kyle Aaron Huff, 28, shot eight people, killing six of them, at a tidy blue house on East Republican Street before putting a shotgun to his own head. Obviously, he was an archetypal lone freak who stockpiled weapons and ammunition, who snapped on a fundamental level, in whom none of these things could be predicted.

But Huff was also a methodical man who in recent weeks, and perhaps longer, had hung out on the local rave scene. He knew some of the people he slaughtered. Some in the multifaceted rave community say they made attempts to be kind and loving to Huff—to offer him acceptance in a world that had either tossed him aside or that he had rejected. His response was to walk out of an after-rave house party at 7 a.m., go to the black pickup he had driven, and grab a pistol, a pistol-grip shotgun, a can of red engine-block spray paint, and enough ammunition to murder far more people than six.

It's a rough thing for some on the rave scene to process, that he'd been in their midst and rejected the acceptance and emotional openness that are hallmarks of a world of outcasts who accept outcasts. Huff wasn't really the random loner as he's been portrayed, invited to an after-party by people who had met him only hours before. Sources in the rave community say Huff had been hanging around dances and late-night parties in Seattle for a few weeks, maybe longer. So what happened near daybreak March 25 was carefully premeditated. It couldn't have been random. He knew exactly what he was doing.

After retrieving the arsenal from the truck, he walked the 250 feet or so along 22nd Avenue East back toward the house at 2112 E. Republican St. Huff stopped three times to spray paint his apocalyptic and so-far-cryptic message on the sidewalk and on one home's steps:

NOW. NOW. NOW.

At the house, Huff then blasted the same people who had been generous and kind to him. He uttered one sentence, something along the lines of, "There's plenty for everyone!" Those who knew him as a youth profess they could not have predicted these actions. Little in his adult life would have foretold them. But there he was, a monster hunting human beings.

The rave community is driven by electronic music with roots in 1970s and 1980s dance music. It is like the punk-rock and hip-hop worlds in that there are many styles and genres of music within its boundaries. The unifying element is that the music is fun and danceable and that the environment is friendly and nonviolent. But there are subtle differences within the scene. There is spiritually based "hippie music" known as goa, and darker, angrier dance music derived from heavy metal sometimes known as psy-core, as well as upbeat poppy music dubbed happy-core. As a result, not all ravegoers attend every rave event. If the music isn't their preferred style, they stay away, much as straight-edge punks would steer clear of a booze-soaked hardcore punk show.

Consequently, not everyone in the local rave scene interviewed for this article agrees about which events or after-parties Huff attended. But on March 11, he was seen at an after-party following an event called "Robogirls" at Studio Seven on South Horton Street, though it's not clear if he was at the "Robogirls" event itself. People who were at the party describe him as being quiet and sitting apart. One woman said she asked Huff at one point if he was cold. He said he was, and she offered him a blanket. When he left, he took the blanket with him.

A number of people say he was either at a rave on March 17 called "Gettin' Lucky," held at the South Lake Union Naval Reserve Building, or at a party later that night. Several who were at the party report that Huff and one of his future shooting victims, Justin "Sushi" Schwartz, interacted. It is not known what they discussed.

Jesiah Martin, who lived at the house on East Republican and was there at the time of the shootings, said in an e-mail exchange that he didn't think anyone had seen Huff before March 24. "Everyone I have talked to never saw him before that night," Martin said. "I, like all my other roommates, saw him for the first time at the CHAC," the Capitol Hill Arts Center where the fateful rave was held Friday, March 24, "then at our house, where we all had very pleasant interactions with him."

The CHAC event is what some in the media have dubbed the zombie rave. Called "Better Off Undead," it ran until 4 a.m. Saturday. Some news media have made it sound as though there was a zombie cult in the rave community. Ravers say that the zombie theme was no different from a toga theme the week before—an attempt by promoters to appeal to audiences with an interesting theme in a competitive dance-event market.

The most telling sign that Huff harbored a newly hatched interest in electronic dance music, however, came almost two months ago when he posted a message on a Seattle rave message board: "hey, Ive never been to a rave in seattle and was wondering if anyone could tell me when one is coming up. Its the 1st of febuary 2006 right now."