AUBURN — The Green River Community Community College was put on lockdown Monday after a student made a veiled threat to a faculty member.
A large police presence was seen on the campus in the 1200 block of SE 320th Street in Auburn around 10:50 a.m.
Police sources said a student made a threat to a faculty member, and police were called to the school. No weapons were seen and the student is no longer on the campus, sources said.
Officers checked the college following the threat.
Some in the area tweeted about the event around 10:50 a.m. Monday, posting pictures of a lockdown message sent to students.
The threat follows a shooting event at a high school in Marysville Friday that left three students dead. This was the second police call to an area school Monday, as a Molotov cocktail was discovered at a Seattle high school.
The Center School was evacuated after a 16-year-old brought a Molotov cocktail to school, the Seattle School District said.
KIRO 7 News
SEATTLE — Seattle police said a 16-year-old is in custody after bringing an incendiary device to school.
The boy brought was is known as a “Molotov cocktail” to the Center School, located in the Seattle Center’s Center House, according to the Seattle School District.
Other students reported it to staff and the school has been evacuated as a precaution.
Officers posted a message about the incident on their Twitter account Monday at about 9:30 a.m.
No one was hurt.
Seattle police and Seattle fire are investigating.
MARYSVILLE, Wash. – A 14-year-old girl who was wounded when a student opened fire inside a Washington state high school has died, raising the death toll in the shooting to three.
Gia Soriano died Sunday night, more than two days after she was shot, officials at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett said.
“We are devastated by this senseless tragedy,” her family said in a statement, read at a news conference by Dr. Joanne Roberts. “Gia is our beautiful daughter, and words cannot express how much we will miss her.”
Roberts said Gia’s family was donating her organs for transplant.
Another girl was killed Friday when a popular freshman at Marysville-Pilchuck High School north of Seattle opened fire.
The shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, died at the scene of a self-inflicted wound.
Three other students remain hospitalized, two in critical condition and one in serious condition.
Earlier Sunday, parents and students gathered in a gymnasium at the school for a community meeting, with speakers urging support and prayers and tribal members playing drums and singing songs. Fryberg was from a prominent Tulalip Indian tribes family.
Young people hugged each other and cried and speakers urged people to come together during the gathering Sunday.
“We just have to reach for that human spirit right now,” said Deborah Parker, a member of the Tulalip Indian tribes.
“Our legs are still wobbly,” said Tony Hatch, a cousin of one of the injured students. “We’re really damaged right now.”
Of the wounded students, only 14-year-old Nate Hatch showed improvement, though he remained in serious condition in intensive care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Fifteen-year-old Andrew Fryberg also remained in critical condition in intensive care. Both are cousins of Jaylen Fryberg.
Meanwhile, 14-year-old Shaylee Chuckulnaskit remained in critical condition in intensive care at Providence Regional Medical Center.
According to family members, 14-year-old Zoe Galasso was killed in the shooting. She has not been identified by the medical examiner.
Fryberg died in the attack, after a first-year teacher intervened. It’s unclear if he intentionally killed himself or if the gun went off in a struggle with a teacher.
The makeshift memorial on a chain link fence by the school, which will be closed this week, kept growing Sunday. Balloons honoring the victims and the shooter adorn the fence along with flowers, stuffed toys and signs.
The close-knit community, meanwhile, on the nearby Tulalip Indian reservation struggled with the news that the shooter was a popular teenager from one of their more well-known families.
A tribal guidance counsellor said no one knows what motivated Fryberg.
“We can’t answer that question,” said Matt Remle, who has an office at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, which is 30 miles north of Seattle. “But we try to make sense of the senselessness.”
In the nearby community of Oso, where a mudslide this spring killed dozens, people planned to gather to write condolence letters and cards.
Remele said he knew Fryberg and the other students well.
“My office has been a comfort space for Native students,” he said. “Many will come by and have lunch there, including the kids involved in the shooting.”
They all were “really happy, smiling kids,” Remle said. “They were a polite group. A lot of the kids from the freshman class were close-knit. Loving.
“These were not kids who were isolated,” he said. “They had some amazing families, and have amazing families.”
These factors make the shooting that much more difficult to deal with, “Maybe it would be easier if we knew the answer,” Remle said. “But we may never know.”
Full statement from the Soriano family:
“We are devastated by this senseless tragedy. Gia is our beautiful daughter and words cannot express how much we will miss her. We’ve made the decision to donate Gia’s organs so that others may benefit. Our daughter was loving, kind and this gift honors her life.
“Thank you to Providence for their excellent care – bar none – from beginning to end. Thank you to our friends and family who have supported us. Thank you to Drs. Bill Finley, Sanford Wright and Anita Tsen for their tremendous support and compassion. And thank you, to Bill and Ben with LifeCenter.
“We ask that you please respect our privacy and give us the space and time we need to grieve and spend time together as a family in memory of Gia.”
Divers measured as many as 200 juvenile sea stars in a square meter at a site on the North Jetty in Florence. | credit: Courtesy of Oregon Coast Aquarium
Divers at the Oregon Coast Aquarium say they have new hope that sea stars will recover from the widespread wasting syndrome that’s wiping them out all along the Pacific coast.
This month they found thousands of thumbnail-sized juvenile sea stars, commonly called starfish, on the North Jetty in Florence.
Diver Jenna Walker said her team didn’t recognize them as sea stars at first because there were so many, and they were so small.
“It was overwhelming,” she said. “When we first got down there it looked like the rocks were covered with barnacles. We soon realized those white spots were thousands and thousands of stars. I have never seen them in numbers like that. It was pretty incredible.”
The divers counted as many as 200 juvenile sea stars in a square meter. They were too small for the divers to identify their species. Adult sea stars were completely absent from the site.
It’s difficult to determine where the new sea stars originated, according to Stuart Clausen, assistant curator of fishes and invertebrates for the Oregon Coast Aquarium.
“Sea stars start out as plankton and drift wherever currents will carry them,” he said.
Clausen said the juveniles in Florence may be the first sign of sea star recovery in Oregon.
“We are not out of the woods yet, but it is encouraging,” he said. “It means some adults survived or at least put viable gametes in the water before being affected.”
Divers with the aquarium plan to monitor the juvenile sea stars in Florence with regular trips to the site in the coming months.
The shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School Friday comes as Washington voters are about to decide two competing gun-related ballot measures.
Credit Colin Fogarty / Northwest News Network
In fact, next week two parents who lost children in the Sandy Hook school shooting are scheduled to be in Seattle. They will campaign for Initiative 594 to expand background checks.
The background check campaign put out a statement shortly after the shooting. It said, in part: “While the facts of today’s shooting are still unclear … It is up to all of us to come together and work to reduce gun violence.”
Cheryl Stumbo is the sponsor of Initiative 594 and a shooting survivor. Stumbo acknowledges that most school shooters obtain their guns from home or a relative.
“594 if and when it passes is obviously not going to prevent all gun violence in our state, but it is a way for us to do something,” she said.
Stumbo said she’s convinced if I-594 passes it will save some lives.
Initiative 591 is the competing gun rights measure on Washington’s ballot. It would prevent the state from adopting a background check requirement that goes beyond what federal law requires. That campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The National Rifle Association also held back in contrast to gun control advocates who were vocal in the hours after the Marysville shooting.
Well, it’s nearly Halloween, which means it’s that time of year again when cultural misappropriation runs amok; when you end up at a party and some one comes clad in faux Native American garb, i.e. a chicken-feathered headdress and multi-colored racing stripes on his face. Invariably, the man’s date comes costumed as a “Pocahottie,” and is completely oblivious to the plague of violence against indigenous women in North America. So, folks, here are 15 people who have publicly expressed their interest in dressing up as a Native American this year. Be warned. Some of these are pretty awful:
Indigenous rights offer a path to a radically more just and sustainable country – which is why the Canadian government is bent on eliminating them
Fish Lake on Tsilhqot’in territory in British Columbia, where the Indigenous Tsilhqot’in nation has prevented a copper and gold mine from being built. Photograph: Friends of the Nemaiah Valley
The unrest is palpable. In First Nations across Canada, word is spreading of a historic court ruling recognizing Indigenous land rights. And the murmurs are turning to action: an eviction notice issued to a railway company in British Columbia; a park occupied in Vancouver; lawsuits launched against the Enbridge tar sands pipeline; a government deal reconsidered by Ontario Algonquins; and sovereignty declared by the Atikamekw in Quebec.
These First Nations have been emboldened by this summer’s Supreme Court of Canada William decision, which recognized the aboriginal title of the Tsilhqot’in nation to 1,750 sq km of their land in central British Columbia – not outright ownership, but the right to use and manage the land and to reap its economic benefits.
The ruling affects all “unceded” territory in Canada – those lands never signed away through a treaty or conquered by war. Which means that over an enormous land mass – most of British Columbia, large parts of Quebec and Atlantic Canada, and a number of other spots – a new legal landscape is emerging that offers the prospect of much more responsible land stewardship.
First Nations are starting to act accordingly, and none more so than the Tsilhqot’in. They’ve declared a tribal park over a swath of their territory. And they’ve announced their own policy on mining – a vision that leaves room for its possibility, but on much more strict environmental terms. Earlier this month they erected a totem pole to overlook a sacred area where copper and gold miner Taseko has for years been controversially attempting to establish itself; no mine will ever be built there.
And the Canadian government’s response? Far from embracing these newly recognised indigenous land rights, they are trying to accelerate their elimination. The court has definitively told Canada to accept the reality of aboriginal title: the government is doing everything in its power to deny it.
Canadians can be pardoned for believing that when the country’s highest court renders a decision, the government clicks their heels and sets themselves to implementing it. The judiciary directs, the executive branch follows: that’s how we’re taught it works. But it doesn’t always – and especially not when what’s at stake is the land at the heart of Canada’s resource extraction.
The new land rights ruling is now clashing directly with the Canadian government’s method for cementing their grip on land and resources. It’s a negotiating policy whose name – the so-called Comprehensive Land Claims – is intended to make your eyes glaze over. But its bureaucratic clothing disguises the government’s naked ambition: to grab as much of indigenous peoples’ land as possible.
This is what dispossession by negotiation looks like. The government demands that First Nations trade away – or in the original term, to “extinguish” – their rights to 95% of their traditional territory. Their return is some money and small parcels of land, but insidiously, as private property, instead of in the collective way that indigenous peoples have long held and stewarded it. And First Nations need to provide costly, exhaustive proof of their rights to their own land, for which they have amassed a stunning $700 million in debt – a debt the government doesn’t think twice about using to arm-twist.
Despite the pressure, most First Nations have not yet signed their names to these crooked deals – especially when the supreme court is simultaneously directing the government to reconcile with First Nations and share the land. But the supreme court’s confirmation that this approach is unconstitutional and illegal matters little to the government. What enables them to flout their own legal system is that Canadians remain scarcely aware of it.
Acting without public scrutiny, prime minister Stephen Harper is trying to shore up support for this policy – now 40 years old – to finally secure the elimination of indigenous land rights. The process is led by the same man, Douglas Eyford, who has been Harper’s advisor on getting tar sands pipelines and energy projects built in western Canada. That is no coincidence. The government is growing more desperate to remove the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of a corporate bonanza for dirty fossil fuels: the unceded aboriginal title of First Nations – backed now by the supreme court of Canada.
A public commenting period opened during the government’s pr blitz has created an opportunity for the indigenous rights movement and concerned Canadians to demand a long-overdue change in the government’s behaviour. Recognising aboriginal title, restoring lands to First Nations management, would be to embrace the diversity and vision we desperately need in this moment of ecological and economic crisis.
Because the government agenda is not just about extinguishing indigenous land rights. It’s about extinguishing another way of seeing the world. About extinguishing economic models that prize interdependence with the living world, that recognise prosperity isn’t secured by the endless depletion of resources. And about extinguishing a love for the land, a love rooted in the unique boundaries and beauty of a place.
“The land is the most important thing,” Tsilhqot’in chief Roger William told me. “Our songs, our place names, our history, our stories – they come from the land that we are a part of. All of it is interrelated with who we are.”
The few days I spent in Tsilhqot’in territory five years ago made that vivid. It is a land of snow-capped mountains – Ts’il-os, who in their stories was a man transformed into giant rock after separating from his wife. Wild horses stalk the valleys. Salmon smoke on drying racks. The Tsilhqot’in carefully protect and nurture these fish – running stronger in their rivers than anywhere else in the province.
That’s why the habit of government officials, of media and even of supreme court judges to call the Tsilhqoti’in “nomadic” bothers William so much: his people have lived on these lands for thousands of years, while it is non-natives who are constantly moving and resettling. And what could be more nomadic and transient than the extractive industry itself – grabbing what resources and profits it can before abandoning one area for another.
As Canadians look more closely, they are discovering that the unceded status of vast territories across this country is not a threat, as they’ve long been told. It is a tremendous gift, protected with love by indigenous nations over generations, to be seized for the possibilities it now offers for governing the land in a radically more just and sustainable way for everyone.
In this battle between the love of the land and a drive for its destruction, those behind the extractive economy have everything to lose and indigenous peoples everything to win. The rest of us, depending on our stand, have a transformed country to gain.
Atlanta, Georgia – Statement of the Executive Board of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)
As tribal nations gather this week in Atlanta, Georgia for NCAI’s 71st Annual Convention, the NCAI Executive Board released the following joint statement:
“We are deeply saddened by the tragedy that occurred at Marysville-Pilchuck High School on Friday. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims, the students of Marysville School District, and the Tulalip tribes.
It is at times like these that Native communities from all across Indian County come together in support of each other. As Native peoples, we recognize that every youth is sacred. Each of the young people involved in this tragedy represent a loss to the Tulalip tribes and Indian Country – they were sons, daughters, friends, and future leaders of their communities.
Unfortunately, acts of violence in schools are occurring more frequently across the country and Native communities are not immune to inexplicable acts that leave their communities forever changed.
NCAI stands with all those who are grieving at this time – Native and non-Native. We are all mourning loss and by coming together we will be strengthened by our resolve, our hope, and our prayers. We will work closely with the Tulalip tribe and the surrounding community in any way we can to understand and address this horrible tragedy.”
NCAI President Cladoosby, a well-known leader in the Pacific Northwest, expressed his solidarity with the Tulalip tribes. “As a father and grandfather, my thoughts and prayers are with my Tulalip relatives. All of Indian Country is holding the Tulalip people in our thoughts and prayers.”
Jaylen Fryberg performs in his dance regalia during the Paddle to Squaxin Island, August 2012. Courtesy photo
By Andrew Gobin, Herald Writer
Herald writer Andrew Gobin is a member of the Tulalip Tribes and grew up on the reservation.
TULALIP — What do you say about a young man whose actions forever changed the lives of so many? You can seek rhyme and reason, you can analyze his troubles, you can gaze into the abyss of disbelief.
This is not about gun control, this is not about how a community failed a young man, and it’s not about using his troubles to solve everyone’s problems.
Strangers are telling Jaylen Fryberg’s story. Strangers who never met him.
What do you say about a boy? You say who he was.
Jaylen Fryberg came from a large, influential family on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. His grandfather, Ray Fryberg Sr., sat on the tribal council and is the director of Cultural and Natural Resources for the tribes. His grandmother, Sheryl Fryberg, was an executive with the tribes for many years, most recently the general manager of tribal government operations. His father, Ray Fryberg Jr., also works in Natural Resources for the tribes. His mother, Wendy Fryberg, a former Marysville School Board member, is deputy general manager for tribal government operations. He has two sisters, Tenika Fryberg and Mekyla Fryberg, and two brothers, Anthony Gobin and Julian Fryberg.
Jaylen was grounded in the traditions of the Snohomish people, his people, on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. He was a star wrestling and football athlete since he was young, competing with his cousins. He was an avid hunter and fisherman, from a place where rites of passage include those skills.
Jaylen came from a traditional family with a strong presence not only at Tulalip, but with tribes up and down the Pacific Northwest coast. He sang and drummed with the men of his family, learning to lead the group at a young age. His father and grandfather were dedicated to grooming Jaylen to be a strong leader, like so many of his elders.
His great-grandmother, Della Hill, was a strong spiritual leader in the Shaker faith throughout Northwest reservations. That was a path Jaylen and others in his family followed.
As he grew, Jaylen learned to revere traditional dances, earning his dance shirt and feather headdress. The shirt is embroidered across the chest and along the sleeves with small paddles hand-carved from cedar. The paddles clacked as he danced. The shirt and headdress were presented to him by tribal elders who chose him to be a lead dancer. Along with these came the responsibility to carry on tribal traditions. He wore the dance shirt and headdress often, at tribal ceremonies and the annual Canoe Journey, a summertime celebration of cultural heritage.
From the time Jaylen was 5 or 6, he was involved in sports. He wrestled on the tribe’s team and played football on city and school teams, including this year as a freshman with the MPHS Tomahawks. His teammates, often cousins and friends, were closer to him than brothers. Jaylen always made time for them.
He learned to fish for salmon using gill nets with his father and grandfather. Many Tulalip families are fishing families.
Throughout the fall and winter, Jaylen was an avid hunter. He hunted deer and elk with his dad and brother, never failing to bring an animal home. He hunted for many reasons, including to feed families in their times of sorrow. Tulalip people find comfort and connection to each other in sharing traditional foods
At 14, Jaylen started high school at Marysville Pilchuck. He seemed to have it all. He was in a long-term relationship with a great girl, was part of a strong family, pulled down good grades and was on the football team. High school can be stressful, but he seemed to be handling things well enough. The truth is, no one saw this coming. A few outbursts on social media, a few scuffles, normal freshman angst that came with normal consequences. After Friday’s events, we are left with questions that may never be answered.
Jaylen got in a fight and was suspended from the football team just before a crucial game. Two of the boys he shot — Andrew Fryberg and Nate Hatch — were his cousins and also on the football team. Were they targeted because they would play in the championship game that night? We don’t know.
He had separated from his girlfriend, and it is speculated that caused an argument. Contrary to many news reports, his girlfriend did not attend Marysville Pilchuck. She was not among those shot.
And there is talk of bullying. All six of the students involved were close. They grew up together. They competed together. They went to homecoming together only a week before.
Did they tease each other? Of course. That’s what cousins are for.
We know Jaylen became troubled. Why is not clear.
What he did in that cafeteria was monstrous.
His uncle, John Dumonte, told TV reporters, though, that Jaylen wasn’t a monster.
As someone who walked with him in this community, who knew him from the time he was small, I understand that sentiment.
Culture and tradition can fall away. Not for Jaylen. He was viewed as living hope for the tribes’ future.
Now he is gone.
The shaken community on both sides of I-5 now must put the pieces together, to help each other learn how to heal from this, to understand why.
