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Sunday paper, which is still supposedly a joint endeavor by the staffs of both the Times and the P-I, there were three separate stories, all viewable on the virtual front page—one about the murder itself, one rehashing the flawed case that had sent LaShawn to prison years earlier, and a third under the byline of my old nemesis, columnist Maxwell Cole.
    Max and I have never been friends. A very long time ago, however, we were fraternity brothers when we were both students at the University of Washington, known locally as the U. Dub. Everything was fine until he showed up at a mixer with a cute blond girl named Karen Moffitt. Much to Max’s dismay, Karen and I hit it off immediately, and eventually we ended up getting married. Years passed. Karen and I eventually divorcedand she subsequently died, but Max has never gotten over the fact that I stole her away from him in the first place. I think his long-running feud with anyone and everyone at Seattle PD is symptomatic of his long-running feud with me. But then maybe I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur on that score.
    Naturally, I harbor no ill will at all about any of this. Right. Of course not. Which is why I read Max’s piece first. It was prominently placed, right there below the virtual fold.
     
    LaShawn Tompkins: 1975–2005

    A life transformed; a life destroyed

    by MAXWELL COLE
Special to the Times
    LaShawn Tompkins was nineteen years old when he was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Aleta Princess Jones. He was twenty-one when he was convicted of aggravated first-degree homicide and sentenced to death. He was twenty-eight when DNA analysis of the evidence in that flawed case caused him to be released from his cell on death row with no new charges filed against him. Now, at age thirty, he’s dead, gunned down execution-style in the doorway of his mother’s Rainier Valley home.
    I’ve always been amazed how Max can dredge up yesterday’s news and turn it into fodder for one of his bleeding-heart columnsfor which someone actually pays him money. I could tell from the opening paragraph this one would be no exception.
    As a child, LaShawn was a bright student who got good grades and a series of Sunday school perfect-attendance records from his neighborhood church, the African Bible Baptist Church. By junior high, though, Sunday school was a thing of the past. He was running with the wrong crowd—a much older crowd—that automatically put him on the wrong side of the law. By fifteen, he had dropped out of school, had several juvenile offenses on his record, and was on the fast track as an up-and-coming lieutenant in the local Crips organization. From there it was only a short hop and a skip to death row.
    Yes, Sunday school kiddo goes bad. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Had I been reading a hard copy of the story, I would have been tempted to wad up the newspaper and pitch it across the room. There was no way, however, I was going to throw my laptop, so I gritted my teeth and kept reading.
    “Despite being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, LaShawn used the time in prison to turn his life around completely,” says Mark Granger, executive director and pastor of the King Street Mission where Tompkins had worked as a counselor since his release from Walla Walla two years ago.
    “After being wrongly convicted, he could easily have become hardened and bitter. Prison, especially adeath row existence, tends to do that. Instead, LaShawn devoted his life to Christ and to helping those he considered less fortunate than himself.”
    Yes, and the crippled shall walk and the blind shall see, I thought. So which one of those “less fortunates” plugged him full of lead?
    It was his wrongful conviction in the death of fifteen-year-old murder victim Aleta Jones that put LaShawn Tompkins on death row. According to Philippa Jones, Aleta’s mother, LaShawn had, in the years since his release, gone out of his way to