Critical Mass Gone Wrong

Pnina and I had dinner at Kabul the other night with a few of her friends from U of W.  One of them, Ryan McElroy, said that he participated in the Critical Mass ride on Friday, July 26, the one that went horribly wrong.

If you didn’t hear the story, here’s the brief summary.  The riders were going up Aloha Street on Capitol Hill. A couple of riders parked themselves in front of one car to keep it from trying to enter the lane until the rest of the riders went by — this is called “corking”.  The driver was running late to a dinner reservation so he was not amused.  There were some words exchanged between himself and the two cyclists (eventually a few more riders came along, including Ryan).  Then the driver did something stupid — he backed up the car and then drove it forward into the two cyclists.  One of them got out of the way, but the other wasn’t so lucky — the driver rolled over his leg (amazingly, no bones broken!).  Another rider jumped onto the hood of the car as it tried to get away (he used the roof-rack to hang on).  Then other riders came along and mob mentality set in — by the end, the car had four slashed tires, broken windows, and the driver was bleeding from his head.  By the time the police came around, Ryan says that the situation was pretty much defused.

The police report was very one-sided — it made it appear like the cyclists were responsible for inciting violence and the driver was simply acting in self defense.  Ryan tried to stick around and explain the real story, but the police (most of them) weren’t interested.  The first newspaper stories were based on the police report so they were similarly one-sided.

In response, Ryan wrote a blog post explaining what he witnessed.  His post got a lot of hits, was linked to, and eventually he started getting calls from local news: The Stranger, Seattle Times, The PI, Kiro 7 TV.  Then Q13 Fox called him up to do a story and he suggested meeting them at the site – at Aloha Street.  Q13 sent a cameraman but no interviewer, which he said made it difficult/awkward to do the interview.  No matter.  He walked the cameraman through the scene and told the story.  In the piece that aired, they ended up using only one of his quotes: “Yeah, I guess someone had a knife”.  After all the time he took to explained what happened, it was yet another completely one-sided story.