More than two weeks after the deadly shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival, Seattle City Council members pressed the city's top police official and the mayor's office for answers at a public safety committee hearing on Tuesday. The violence left three people dead and several others hurt, yet details about possible suspects who have not been caught remain unclear. Council members focused much of their questioning on the investigation and on why it took so long for the public to learn whether they were safe.
The tone was tense from the outset. Asked directly whether there was a killer on the loose, the interim chief declined to give a yes-or-no answer. He said that after speaking with his detectives that morning, investigators were still combing through warrants and reviewing video surveillance from the scene, and that he could not rule the possibility in or out. During the hearing itself, Seattle police shared little new information about the shooting.
Council member Deborah Juarez pressed Mayor Katie Wilson's public safety director, Allison Holcomb, over why the public had to wait so long for information after the shooting, which happened at around six o'clock that evening. Juarez said no investigation was needed to explain the roughly five-hour delay and argued the answer could be given immediately, adding that council members were hearing conflicting accounts that a planned press conference had been told to stand down until dignitaries arrived.
Holcomb pushed back, telling Juarez that they both knew the exchange had become a political question and that her focus was on public safety at that moment. Juarez rejected that framing, saying she disagreed that it was political and considered it instead a factual question that officials should be able to answer plainly. The back-and-forth underscored the friction between the council and the mayor's office over how the response was handled.
Council member Dan Strauss voiced his own frustrations, saying that the flow of information at the Bite of Seattle on Sunday was consistent with communication and cooperation challenges he had seen from the mayor's office. He drew a pointed contrast, noting that those problems were different from what he had experienced in working with the police department over the previous seven months.
Bob Kettle, the council's public safety chair, revealed that he had taken part in a 26-minute meeting on the night of the shooting at about 8:57 p.m. that included the mayor, the deputy mayor, Governor Bob Ferguson and others. Even so, he said, the public was left out of the loop. Mayor Wilson has said the Office of the Inspector General is examining how the city responded, but Kettle wanted answers sooner, saying the matter would not stop and that the inspector general's review had no bearing on that.
Two officials who were not in that late-night meeting were nonetheless named repeatedly by council members: assistant chief Tyrone Davis and detective Brian Pritchard, both of whom were at the scene the night of the shooting. According to the interim chief, Davis was tending to personal business, while Holcomb from the mayor's office said her side did not prevent Pritchard from attending. The questions over who was present and who spoke to the public are likely to persist as the inquiry continues.
