Our friends at The Seattle Times have a moving update on the Clemmons family and how they’re still in limbo as the city decides whether they will cover the damages inflicted on the Clemmons’ Leschi home during the police hunt for their nephew Maurice Clemmons last November:
The windows are boarded up. The walls stripped down to studs, and the floors to exposed, scarred wood, at the city’s orders and expense. Everything that represented family and music, travels and tradition has been hauled off to a storage unit because of the tear-gas residue that settled on it that November night.
“I never imagined that this is what I was getting myself into,” Chrisceda Clemmons said as we stood inside her Leschi home recently. “And not just myself, but my family.”
…
And yet, 10 months later, the family is still living in a rental home, waiting for their claim to be settled so they can rebuild not just their house, but their very lives.
“We’re nervous; we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Chrisceda Clemmons said. “The city could still choose not to do anything and then we would be homeless.
“We did the right thing by protecting the community, and we just want to be back,” she said. The Seattle City Council reviewed the family’s claim two weeks ago during a closed, executive session. The council is scheduled to meet again on the issue within the next month.
How is there even any question about whether they should be reimbursed? Can someone explain this to me?
Uhhh — Yah! What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is the city thinking? Fix their house for goodness sakes! Chrisceda ran to help the police at the expense of a family connection and trusted they would do the right thing. Make it healthy and whole City of Seattle. There has already been enough suffering because of Maurice’s actions.
Amen!!!
If $100K in repairs would bring the home back to the state it was in before the seige, and the family are asking for a $300K remodel, for example, with the taxpayers’ money the folks who pay out have plenty of negotiation on their hands to come to a settlement – or face losing their jobs to the scandal that follows. Please report the ENTIRE story. The city has spent an enormous amount on this family during the entire time they’ve been out of their house, on everything from housing in an expensive rental to paying lost wages, replacing belongings, etc. If negotiations with the family are the hold up then CD News should report that side of the story also, in the interest of being impartial, rather than just assuming that the city employees trying to sort this out are being heartless.
There’s isn’t a question of whether they should be “made whole.” There is a question of how much that should cost. Repairing a house to the state it was in prior to the incident is not the same as, for example, making it 10 times better than it ever was, and at ten times the cost. Again, getting the whole story of what part of the negotiations with the family are stalled, would be good journalism.
do you have any evidence that is what is happening?
things like this take several months to years to figure out (so they say)
but if you get out their and protest on the familys behalf, they’ll get their money in a week tops. she was related to a man that killed 4 officers in the worst attack on law enforcement in state history, her case file goes to the bottom of the stack, doesnt matter if she tried to help police or not