A violent month gives the entire community reason to mourn

Saturday afternoon, people were claiming spots along Fourth Avenue for the Seafair Torchlight Parade, one of the traditions that define Seattle.

On Third Avenue, a block from the folks in white plastic chairs, a gunman had shot six people the previous afternoon. That's not something we associate with Seattle.

This summer, again and again, things have happened that defy our collective notion of what the Seattle area is.

We are blessed with beautiful geography and a vibrant economy, but we are still part of a messy, violent world.

We willfully forget that. We get caught up in utopia-think, but this summer has been just bad enough to change that and leave us wondering: What's going on around here?

July 11, two Seattle women, Mary Cooper, 56, and her daughter Susanna Stodden, 27, were shot to death while hiking in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

July 17, four people were killed in their Kirkland home. Olga Milkin, 28; her sister Lyuba Botvina, 24, and Milkin's children, Justin, 5, and Andrew, 3, were stabbed and their house burned.

Friday afternoon, Naveed Afzal Haq, a Pakistani American, burst into the offices of the Jewish Federation and shot six women, killing one of them.

It is too much.

Remember how the Columbine shootings shocked people? Something like that wasn't supposed to happen in school. It wasn't supposed to happen in well-off neighborhoods or in small communities. The shooters were not supposed to be regular suburban kids.

People can die by the carload in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, but life has rules, right? We are safe because we are protected by the rules — except the world doesn't work that way.

The odds may be on our side, but fate doesn't always play the odds.

These incidents affect us so much because they remind us that we are not immune to violence — not at home, not at the office, not out walking in nature.

We are most affected when innocent people are killed, when safe places are violated, when the crime is senseless — as if there were sensible killings. We worry when we can put ourselves in the places of the victims.

When I listed recent violent crimes, I didn't mention the July 20 Skyway killings. Prosecutors say 23-year-old Dimitri Sidorchuk, wielding a MAC-11 machine pistol, shot and killed Sovintha Nhem, 23, Sophea Sun, 20, and, accidentally, his friend William Belk, 28, in a confrontation between two groups of men.

I mentioned that incident to someone when we were talking about July's carnage and she said, yes, but weren't they in gangs or something? If that were true, people not in gangs would be safe, I suppose.

That shooting happened three days after the Kirkland slayings, but it doesn't stick with us in the same way.

The Green River Killer was a local. He killed dozens of women, but most people couldn't relate to the victims.

All of the July killings send waves of pain and stress into the community, but some reach further than others.

The victims are most affected, their family and friends, then communities they touched personally, and after that people who have some reason for identifying with them (mothers, hikers, teachers, immigrants, Jews).

The crimes affect people connected to the suspects, too.

Finally, the entire community is touched. The daily lives of people far from the crimes may not be disrupted, but most of us do feel some loss. We mourn for the victims and for our own vulnerability.

The Jewish Federation had one of the highest-security offices in the city, yet an armed man was able to barge in. The suspect had a permit to carry a gun and had obvious mental problems, having been arrested for exposing himself to women this spring.

We still don't know who killed the two hikers, or why someone would knife four people in their home.

And now we are wondering what has become of our community.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com. His column runs Thursdays and Sundays in Northwest Life and is found at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.