1/1/2024 0 Comments Mad pack gang seattleTom became a neighborhood activist, fighting overdevelopment and the placement of cell-phone towers, and serving for a couple of years on the Seattle Planning Commission. Tom and Elizabeth, a tall, lean, and athletic couple, took to life in the Northwest, going on long hikes in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades. In 1983, he was hired as a federal prosecutor in Seattle. “But Tom always wanted to do something for society, and that kind of life was never for him,” Elizabeth Wales told me. I looked down and saw that the bottom seams of her trousers were covered with blood.”Īfter graduating from law school, at Hofstra University, Wales took a job with the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When I was standing there talking to her, it was hard to look her in the eye. “She didn’t come out with blood all over her. “The doctor obviously had put clean scrubs on to come out and talk to us,” Redman recalled. Just before dawn, a surgeon emerged from the operating room to say that Wales had died. They were told that Wales was in surgery. Attorney, and his wife, Kay and Eric Redman, one of Wales’s closest friends, who had once been married to Elizabeth’s sister. Attorney, who also lived in Queen Anne and had heard the shots Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s chief of police Bob Westinghouse, another Assistant U.S. Wales appeared to be conscious, but he couldn’t speak, and was taken by ambulance to the trauma center at the Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle.įriends and colleagues gathered at the hospital, among them Jerry Diskin, the acting U.S. An off-duty police officer, who happened to be nearby, arrived within minutes. (Investigators won’t divulge the exact number of shots.) Mary Aylward, an elderly woman who lived next door, heard the shots and called 911. About fifteen minutes later, someone shot him three or four times through the window from the back yard. At 10:24 P.M., Wales sent an e-mail to DeJongh from the computer, which was on a desk in front of the window. The Waleses had renovated the house during the years that they lived there, and in the basement they had installed a picture window, which provided a view of the small back yard. That night, he had also planned to work on a fund-raising letter for Washington CeaseFire, the leading gun-control advocacy group in the state, of which he was president. Tom used a computer there at night, usually to send e-mails to his children and to DeJongh. (Elizabeth had come out as a lesbian, and the marriage was an inevitable casualty.) Under the terms of the divorce, Tom kept the house, though Elizabeth, a literary agent, ran her business from the basement during the day. They had a son and a daughter, who at the time were both in Britain, attending graduate school, and they had divorced, amicably, in 2000. Tom and Elizabeth had met as high-school students at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and married when Tom was an undergraduate at Harvard. At about ten o’clock, carrying a glass of wine, he went to the basement office that he had been sharing with his ex-wife, Elizabeth. On the night of October 11th, Wales arrived home after 7 P.M., gave his twenty-year-old cat, Sam, her nightly arthritis medication, and prepared to install some drywall in a stairwell on the second floor. He took satisfaction in mustering the resources of the federal government to take on criminals, especially those with white collars who abused their privileged status. He also had idealistic notions about his work. When he worked late, which was often, he would tell his family and friends, “I’m here at my post, serving my sovereign.” The phrase was partly a joke, a bit of feigned grandiosity to justify a tendency toward excessive meticulousness: Wales did things slowly. Wales was forty-nine years old and had been a federal prosecutor for eighteen years. In the evening, after leaving his office, near the federal courthouse, he returned to his Craftsman-style, wood-frame house in a quiet neighborhood known as Queen Anne. But that afternoon Wales called DeJongh and said that he had projects he needed to work on at home. Wales, an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, had planned to have dinner and spend the evening with his girlfriend, Marlis DeJongh, a court reporter who lived downtown. Tom Wales was not supposed to be home on the night of October 11, 2001. ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX WILLIAMSON, PHOTO COURTESY WALES FOUNDATION Attorney in Seattle who became a gun-control activist, was killed in his home in 2001.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |