Doug’s World

Mystery Solved

The week before last, I drove home one night and saw a bunch of people crowded around the northeast corner of 28th and Jackson. It was dark and raining hard, and while looking at the crowd over to the left I nearly hit a pedestrian walking from the right out into the street. I slammed on the brakes, waved meakly at the man I had nearly killed, and he headed over to the corner to join the group huddled around the entrance to Flo Ware Park. There were a bunch of soggy people there, with candles and flowers all over the place, and one girl I happened to make eye contact with appeared to be crying.

The next night, it was the same scene, with maybe 5 or 6 people instead of the 20 or so on the first night. Then then night after that, I worked extremely late, and coming home after midnight there were four people there in the freezing rain, sitting on folding chairs in front of a pile of soggy flowers and cards.

I figured somebody must have been killed there, in a car wreck or a shooting or something. That intersection has a fair number of scary-looking guys hanging around some nights, so a shooting seemed likely to me. But I did many searches and never found the story. I really wanted to take pictures of those people at the nightly vigil, I must admit, but I felt like it would be a bit creepy to stop and hop out with my Nikon and start shooting.

Then yesterday, Megan and I were having lunch at a Chinese restaurant over in Chinatown the International District, and two cops were at the table next to us. So I asked one of them, and he told me what that was all about. Allen Joplin, a local teenager, had been killed at a dance downtown, and they were having the nightly vigil back in his neighborhood. That’s why I couldn’t find it in my searches, because the actual killing had happened far away from the location where those sad soggy people were sitting every night last week.

Here’s the story as reported on a local news channel.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 3:09 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.