Memorial planned for the slain and the slayer

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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Memorial planned for the slain and the slayer

By KERY MURAKAMI
P-I REPORTER

In the recesses of the interior, an object looms, shrouded in black cloth.

Massacre on Capitol Hill: See complete coverage

It's a constant reminder in the back of the room, as in the back of the mind, of why Amani Ellen Loutfy and several other twenty- and thirtysomethings have been spending most of their evenings recently in a warehouse in West Seattle.

On one of those evenings last week, a wooden structure -- the beginnings of a memorial that will rise 25 feet before crumbling to ashes -- stood before Loutfy and the rest.

There are seven sides to the memorial. Six are for the people shot to death in a house on Capitol Hill on March 25: Jeremy Martin, Melissa Moore, Justin Schwartz, Suzanne Thorne, Jason Travers and Christopher Williamson. The seventh is for the killer, Kyle Huff, who turned a gun on himself and ended his own life as well that day.


		PAUL JOSEPH BROWN / P-I
	In a warehouse on West Marginal Way in Seattle, Amani Ellen Loutfy and Chris Rudesell work on a memorial Saturday to the victims of the shootings on Capitol Hill. It will eventually be put ablaze at the Burning Man event in Nevada.

When the memorial is displayed at the Seattle Center July 30 to Aug. 17, there will be a mirror on the side for Huff -- a broken one. Viewers can take from it what they want in their own cracked reflection, Loutfy said.

The memorial isn't intended to tell people what to think. What they bring to the memorial will make it what it is.

Most of the dozen or so people who've been involved in building the memorial are part of the Burning Man community, the group with an artistic bent that gathers for an annual festival in the Nevada desert. They are inspired by the temples the artist David Best builds at Burning Man.

People walk inside Best's temples and leave mementos, or write letters to those they've lost -- then watch the whole thing go up in flames. The memorial builders say it brings a cleansing of the soul.

At the Seattle Center, people will be invited to write on the memorial. Then the whole thing will be hauled to Burning Man in late August and torched.

David "Dummy" Kitts, smoking and drinking a beer, said he and he other builders are essentially mounting a canvas on which others can paint their grief.

They debated whether to include Huff but ultimately decided they couldn't leave him out. He's too much a part of what happened, Loutfy says.

Some, like Loutfy and Kitts, knew victims of the shooting.

Others were drawn to build the memorial because they felt the horror of that Saturday afternoon when they heard that Huff, invited to a house party, walked from the porch through the house, systematically firing and killing.

Loutfy pointed to the black cloth in the back of the warehouse.

"The door to the bathroom is under there," she said. It's covered because the large bullet hole blown through it is too disturbing to see.

The builders don't plan to display the door at the Seattle Center. But they will take it, as well as the front door of the house, to Nevada and burn them, too.

For the artists who have been building the memorial, there is the catharsis of hammering in each nail.

There is the comfort in not grieving alone.

During a break last week, the artists remembered their friends.

Martin, in his mischievous way, would have made it hard to build the memorial, Loutfy said.

"He would have come dressed like a clown and kept distracting us," she said. "He would have kept things light."

Yeah, Kitts said, Martin would have wanted rubber chickens on the memorial. Maybe, he said, someone will stick some on there in Martin's honor.

SCHEDULE

The memorial will be assembled on the plaza above the Seattle Center's Fisher Pavilion beginning July 28. At 3:30 p.m. July 30, a procession to the memorial will depart from 2112 E. Republican St., where the shootings occurred; marchers will gather beforehand at 1:30 p.m. at Miller Community Center, 330 19th Ave. E. The memorial will remain at the Seattle Center until Aug. 17.

For more information, go to www.seattlememorialtemple.org

To make donations, go to www.theshunpike.org/donate and choose the temple project. Or, if you already have a PayPal account, you can use it to donate to 2112templefund@gmail.com.

More headlines and info from Capitol Hill, Queen Anne.