The Washington state Department of Transportation said last week that it was drafting guidelines for employees and contractors operating equipment in places where homeless people are known to camp.
Those rules are coming in response to the June 2 killing of Isaac Palmer under I-5 in south Seattle. And they’re coming too late for a man whose body was discovered Thurs. morning, Feb. 14, by a construction worker using a manlift to remove concrete forms under I-5 in Everett.
Searching for next of kin, the Snohomish County Medical Examiner has not yet released the name of the 61-year-old man, nor have DOT officials said how the man’s body was found or whether heavy equipment ran him over. The worker who enountered the body was treated Thursday at a hospital for shock.
Spokesperson Mike Cotten says that over the past two years the state DOT has called in police and county health workers to clear areas of homeless people during the I-5 widening project. “There’s an Everett gospel mission that’s four or five blocks south” of the construction site, he says, and “our public-information people have been in contact with them.”
Palmer was killed by the blade of a brush-clearing vehicle a contractor was using to prepare for the August repair of northbound I-5 just south of downtown Seattle. His family is pursuing a lawsuit against the state.
A final draft of the new guidelines for DOT work in or near known homeless encampments is not yet publicly available.
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