The facts
In the early hours of Sept. 6, Matthew Lanske, 21, and friends finished dinner in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood and walked into an illegal street takeover near 3rd Avenue and Clay Street, his family told FOX 13. A man and two women tried to rob his friend Isaac Elijah Rios, 20, at gunpoint, the family and Law&Crime reporting of police accounts said.
Lanske's sister, Rebecca Garberding, told FOX 13 her brother tried to take the gun from the man and was shot. Two rounds hit his stomach. A third shattered his pelvis and struck a major artery. Rios was shot in the chest and died. The King County medical examiner classified it a homicide. Seattle police said Lanske was among four people shot in that incident. One dead, three wounded.
His mother, Shanda Barney, told FOX 13 he walked about two blocks looking for help while bleeding. He tried a 7-Eleven. The doors were locked. "I begged them to let me, and there was so much blood coming out of my stomach, I thought I was going to die," she said he told her. She also said people stood around filming and taking pictures instead of helping. He sat down and texted 911 and his girlfriend. Police found him. Harborview. Life support for two days. Two surgeries done, two more coming. Construction job on hold. The family has a GoFundMe.
Seattle police are still asking for video to identify the shooter. Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound put $1,000 on a tip. Detectives did arrest a 44-year-old man in a separate Belltown homicide that same weekend, the shooting of Tionna Simpson. That is a different case. The Rios killing is unsolved.
Three people died in Belltown shootings over that 24-hour stretch. Mayor Katie Wilson promised a gun-violence plan afterward.
Our take
The usual suspects at 2 a.m. in Belltown are not a mystery of the human heart. They are the people who show up to a street takeover with a gun and try to rob a 20-year-old on his way home from dinner. A man and two women. That is the lineup the family described. Police still do not have a name because half the block was too busy recording the victim to record the people who shot him.
Lanske did the thing you are supposed to do. He went for the gun. Seattle did the thing Seattle does. It locked the 7-Eleven. It raised the phones. His friend died in the street. He crawled two blocks with his guts open and had to text 911 himself because nobody with a camera could find the three digits.
Do not make this about the kid who tried. Make it about the takeover culture that treats downtown like a loot pit, and the spectators who treat a gunshot wound like content. Feel ashamed, his sister said, if you ran. Feel worse if you stayed for the B-roll.
The mayor has a plan. She always does. Plans do not grab guns. Lanske did, and Belltown filmed it.
