August 26, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 38

Short Takes

Real Change vendor gets lawyers

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

Willie Jones.

Photo by: Alex Becker , Real Change Intern & Contributing Writer

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Willie Jones spent a night in jail for speaking up to a King County transit cop. Now he’s got two lawyers and a witness who are speaking up for him.

Jones, 50, is a regular Real Change vendor who sells his papers in downtown Seattle at Third Avenue and Columbia Street, where he was arrested July 22 on charges of obstruction and disorderly conduct after the transit cop saw Jones use the green light to step into the crosswalk and wave a handful of papers [“Arrested for being there,” July 29 – Aug. 4].

Attorneys James Bible and Colette Tvedt have volunteered to defend Jones and stood with him Aug. 29 at King County Superior Court, where his trial is now scheduled to start Nov. 17. “Our position,” Tvedt said outside the courtroom after getting her first look at the arrest report, “is that he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Officer Ryan Mikulcik says in the report that his patrol car was stopped at a red light on Third Avenue at 5:15 p.m. when he saw Jones step into the crosswalk. A car coming down Columbia made a “quick turn” north onto Third, he says, nearly hitting Jones. The officer says he yelled at him to stay out of the street, then, after taking a prisoner in his car to jail, returned around 6 p.m. and told Jones it’s illegal to block traffic.

Mikulcik asked for identification, and Jones, who was wearing a Real Change ID badge at the time, told him he didn’t have to provide it because he hadn’t done anything wrong. The officer started handcuffing him and some of Jones’ regular customers began to gather, telling Mikulcik to leave him alone and “making the situation more tense,” the officer writes.

One of them was Jill Thomas, who was walking down Columbia after work when she saw the officer throw Jones up against his car. Thomas asked the officer what he was doing and was told it was none of her business. “Did you see what he did to me?” she says the officer asked her. She said no and started across Third to catch her bus, she says, when the officer yelled at her: “You don’t care because you’re a liberal.”

The comment, she says, was shocking, as was Jones’ arrest. “It makes me so mad,” she says. “He didn’t do anything” — while the car that nearly hit him, she says, was traveling illegally: Third Avenue is for buses only from 3 to 6:30 p.m.

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Comments

Tacoma’s ordinance has answered the complaints of downtown business people who were tired of aggressive pleading from transients 000-223, said Mark Fulghum 156-215, Tacoma Police spokesman. Since the ordinance went into effect, police have logged fewer complaints about aggressive panhandling 1Y0-259.

Mengora | submitted on 12/29/2009, 6:04am

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