Let’s remember when 2 Seattle firefighters attacked a homeless person in Pioneer Square, on this day in 2014 (March 15)
After watching the Seattle Sounders FC lose to Toronto 2–1, two Seattle firefighters and one’s girlfriend were leaving CenturyLink Field when they saw something that they couldn’t accept: a homeless person not bothering anyone. The three people were Robert Howell and Scott Bullene, and Bullene’s girlfriend Mia Jarvinen. They are scum who squandered the universal goodwill afforded firefighters.
According to KOMO News:
According to police, two off-duty Seattle firefighters and a woman were walking through Pioneer Square after the Sounders game when they came across a homeless man sleeping near the Seattle Fallen Firefighters Memorial near the intersection of Occidental Avenue and Main Street. The memorial in Pioneer Square is a tribute to the Seattle firefighters who have died in the line of duty.
Police say the woman became angry about what she saw, yelled at the man for sleeping on the memorial, and started kicking the homeless man.
Steve Banfield was walking his dog nearby when he saw things escalate.
“While I was on the phone with 911, the second man of the original three got into a fight with another homeless man, taking the homeless man’s walking stick from him and beating him with it,” Banfield said.
During the attack, bystander Francis Hicks tried to help the victim, but says the firefighters turned on him, punching him twice in the face.
“That was my friend asleep under the thing right there,” Hicks said. “The guy kicked him in the face. The lady grabbed her foot and threw it on him.”
This sounds all too typical, from the Seattle Times:
One of the two off-duty Seattle firefighters accused of the
attack on a pair of homeless men in Occidental Park on Saturday originally told police he was the victim of an unprovoked assault and wanted to press charges.According to police reports and court documents released Monday, veteran firefighter Robert Howell, 46, told police that he was walking through the park with two friends when he was “suddenly attacked by some unknown person for some unknown reason.”
Howell described his attacker as a “black male in his 30s wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and bluejeans,” according to the police report.
A short time later, however, police heard a very different story from several witnesses who described Howell, fellow firefighter Scott Bullene and Bullene’s girlfriend, Mia Jarvinen, as the instigators, according to police and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
The trio were acquitted, but the two firefighters did lose their jobs. Howell lost his appeal, with a judge saying that he lied about initiating the attack, and in Bullene’s case, the union declined to continue their support when he was arrested in a road rage incident that involved taking a cabdriver’s cellphone. Classy guys!
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