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BrenPioneer Square’s pergola at First and Yesler is a sheltered place to have a seat where police and Parks employees are engaging in an ongoing campaign to get one man to move along. Photo by Adam Hyla
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John Eze says he is a messenger from God. All winter he’s been sitting, sometimes singing aloud, at the foot of Yesler Way in the heart of Pioneer Square under the pergola, the restored remnant of a comfort station and public bath from the turn of last century. Now it’s just a spot out of the rain with a few benches and a trash can. Only Eze and his God know why he’s there.
But on the morning of April 2 it became a stage on which played a drama of half-decipherable events, a play starring Eze and involving as props a hose, a sleeping bag, three cops, and an ambulance.
Among the spectators was Bev Miller, looking down on the pergola from the third-floor window of her legal office just across Yesler Way.
At 9:25 a.m., Miller saw three police cars pull up onto the stone pavers beside the pergola. One officer got out and spoke to the huddled mass that was John Eze where he lay inside a sleeping bag. The cop walked up to him, spoke a few words, then went over to a utility truck where a Parks Department maintenance worker stood waiting. After a moment the officer returned to wait by his car; the worker turned on a garden hose and, nozzle in hand, passed westward under the pergola, spraying water around the benches.
Then, she says, the man with the hose flipped the nozzle upward, shooting water at the man lying prone. “That’s when I got out of the chair,” says Miller. “I was thinking, ‘Maybe I didn’t see that right.’”
Next, “he directed water on top of the sleeping bag.”
Miller’s co-worker, Nick Straley, saw the same thing. He had rounded the corner of First and Yesler on his way into the office when he noticed the police cars and the man with the hose “spraying the ground near where [Eze] was lying on the park bench, and he just turned and sprayed the guy.”
“I don’t know how you could have done that inadvertently.”
Mary Sanders was sitting under a café umbrella just feet from Straley when she saw the man being hosed down. “I yelled ‘Leave that man alone,’” says Sanders. “I never seen him bother anybody.”
Straley crossed the street and confronted the Parks worker, who had moved on to another area of the pavement. “He said, ‘I’ve been dealing with him for five weeks and he won’t move, and I just need to do my job,’” Straley says.
Minutes later, an ambulance pulled up. Eze, his sleeping bag sopping wet in the 40-degree weather, was taken away for what Parks staff said was a mental health evaluation by the county-designated mental health professionals.
Privacy laws prevented further disclosure, but King County mental health superintendent Amnon Shoenfeld says that by state law, an evaluation would lead to commitment only if it indicates that Eze poses imminent danger to himself or others.
Parks staff denied Eze was sprayed. “We talked to a number of people involved,” says spokesperson Malia Langworthy. “We found that Parks maintenance staff followed the appropriate protocols.”
Eze “was not responding, or was responding in a very limited way” to the Parks’ workers requests to get up. Police made the same request, and when it wasn’t followed, the clean-up began. Langworthy denies that the man or his bag was sprayed; there was feces and urine under the bench, she says, and it was being removed. After an inquiry by supervisors, “we feel our protocol was followed and the person was not mistreated by our employee in any way.”
Straley wonders who the Parks Department talked to. He left a message for the worker’s boss, Bob Baines, and left a message that morning; Baines returned his called with a voicemail assuring him Parks would look into it. The Parks Department did not inform Straley that they arrived at a different account of what happened on that 40-degree morning.
“I know what I saw,” Straley says.
Can Eze say what transpired?
Eze was back under the pergola Thurs., April 3, his legs wrapped in the tan cloth sleeping bag that had been hosed down the day before. He has the dark complexion and the crisp drawl of a Jamaican, his voice low and smooth as reggae riddim. A few moments’ conversation casts doubt on any claim that his mental state would pose a threat.
Where are you from? “Where I from is where I am,” he says. What happened yesterday? “That is between me and God.” Did they take you to a hospital? “I don’t want to talk about it.”
What they did, I offered, was wrong. “He the cap fits, let them wear it.” Tell me more, I ask. “It’s past tense, all forgiven. First of first, I was not where I was supposed to be,” he says. “My message is worldwide.”
“Blessed are those who forgive, for they will have mercy. What comes around, it goes around. If I am in pain, I want others to feel pain.”
“I not here for no politics, I come for uniting,” he says. “Not to point the finger but to say ‘Hey, brother’” — his hand in the air, one of the few times he’s moved it from his lap — “‘Do you remember we are still children of God? He created the world so we could have peace. This is supposed to be a heaven; why turn it into hell?’”
I’m scribbling this on a notepad. “Let them know,” he says, his legs trembling in the cold, “the truth is here.”
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