Posted on 02/16/2018 6:24:08 PM PST by confederatecarpetbag
the Kent man who sued Seattle Mayor Ed Murray last year on allegations of sexual abuse decades ago — prompting other accusations to come to light, leading to Murray’s resignation — was found dead early Friday of an apparent drug overdose in an Auburn motel.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
Seattleside.
I doubt Eddie had anything to do with the death of a street hustler/male prostitute junkie loser, but you never know. His “husband” probably keeps him on a short leash these days, like the “gimp” in Pulp Fiction.
Nothing to see here...Just move on...There is limited room at Fort Marcy Park, so it had to be a little messy...
The news just gets better and better.
Eddie has got some night work that needs finishing.
Sometimes night work can become ‘wet work’.
He probably has nothing to do with this death, but many people will first think of the former politician as a person of interest till told otherwise.
Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle, Washington was a big pusher of opening the Soros heroin dens in Seattle.
Heckard’s suit last year prompted four other men to come forward with similar accusations against Murray, eventually leading the mayor to resign in September.
Ed Murray’s time as Seattle mayor boosted his pension past $100,000 a year for life
February 1, 2018 By Lewis Kamb
Seattle Times staff reporter
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/ed-murrays-time-as-seattle-mayor-boosted-his-pension-past-100000-a-year-for-life/
Former Mayor Ed Murray’s retirement pay is significantly enhanced by the high salary he drew as Seattle mayor — the final stop on a more than two-decade career in politics. He resigned Sept. 12 after five men accused him of sexually abusing them as teenagers decades ago.
Former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, who resigned in September amid child sexual-abuse allegations, has started drawing public retirement benefits that will pay him $115,920 a year for the rest of his life.
Murray’s retirement benefits include gross monthly pension payments of about $8,460 from the state and $1,200 from the city, records show.
His total retirement pay was significantly enhanced by the nearly $185,000 annual salary he drew during his first two years as mayor — Murray’s final stop along a more than two-decade career in Washington politics.
All told, Murray’s annual retirement pay easily will surpass earnings for 18 of his 21 years as an elected official, records show. It’s also about $35,920 more — or almost 1½ times greater — than Seattle’s median annual household income of about $80,000.
Murray, who declined an in-person interview about his retirement, answered some questions through his attorney, Steve Fogg.
“Ed was a public servant not making a lot of money each year until he became mayor,” Fogg said. “His focal point was on being mayor and his public service, it wasn’t on retirement.”
Though seemingly comfortable, Murray’s retirement isn’t peculiar; he’s reaping benefits entitled to him under state law and pension plan rules.
Murray is among a small subset of Washington public employees who retire as dual members of pension plans from both the state and one of three large cities (Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane) that provide their own. That guarantees him two monthly pension payments for life. And, because his state and city benefit plans are “portable,” they can be used to help each other maximize retirement benefits.
Both of Murray’s pensions are calculated in part based on his highest average monthly pay for any two consecutive years along with the total number of years worked.
Murray, who turned 62 in May, qualified for his state pension at age 60. When he resigned as mayor, he chose January 1, 2016, as the effective date of his state retirement, giving him two full years of city pay — or an average $15,405 per month — to calculate his state pension benefits. He also received a one-time retroactive retirement payment of $83,025, records show.
His 18 years of state employment, in turn, helped Murray qualify for a city pension. With less than four years as Seattle’s mayor, Murray otherwise would not have met his city retirement plan’s five-year employment requirement to become fully vested.
The former mayor downplayed his financial prospects during the scandal that last year that derailed his political career. Between April and September, when the mayor resigned, five men accused Murray of paying for sex or sexually assaulting them as teenagers decades ago.
Murray denies all the allegations.
The city late last year agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a lawsuit with Delvonn Heckard, the only accuser to take legal action. Heckard included the city as a co-defendant in his lawsuit, which he refiled in October. The complaint contended Murray used his public office and city resources to defame Heckard, his lawyers and other victims by describing them as politically-motivated liars. Under the settlement, Murray did not pay any money, but covered his own legal costs.
“Nothing but my legacy”
In May, shortly after he announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, Murray told The Seattle Times’ editorial board that, “except for a tiny pension, I have nothing but my legacy …”
Along with his two pensions, Murray and his husband, city parks executive Michael Shiosaki, 56, own two homes — one on Seattle’s Capitol Hill assessed at $876,000; the other in Seabrook, a beach community on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, assessed at $505,600. Shiosaki earned about $147,300 in 2016 and has been enrolled in a city pension plan since 2001, records show.
Murray said through his lawyer that he didn’t know last year how much his retirement benefits would be when he characterized a dim financial future for himself.
“He really wasn’t aware of what his ultimate pension would look like until he resigned,” Fogg said.
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But records show Murray kept informed about his pensions over the years by requesting official estimates based on his changing work circumstances, including a calculation from the state’s Department of Retirement Systems dated three days after his election as mayor in November 2013.
At that time, the agency estimated a state pension for Murray of about $71,400 based partly on his anticipated city salary as mayor through his eligible retirement age of 60.
Murray also requested and received formal estimates for his city pension a few weeks after Heckard’s sex-abuse allegations emerged in April, and again in July, on the day Seattle City Councilmember M. Lorena González publicly called for his resignation, according to records and interviews.
Two-week job pays off
When he was 21, Murray landed a temporary clerk-typist’s job at the Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) in Olympia, records show.
He started work in December 1976 — a few months after leaving New York, after officials at a Catholic children’s group home where he had worked accused him of abusing a boy, according to two of his cousins.
The L&I job lasted only two weeks, but that’s all it took to qualify Murray for enrollment into Washington’s Public Employees Retirement System Plan (PERS1). He contributed $14.83 toward retirement from his total earnings of $247, records show.
Murray’s enrollment in the state’s first PERS plan came just under the wire: Nine months later, the state closed that plan to new employees, replacing it with the less generous PERS2 plan.
By 1977, Murray had left L&I and moved to Portland, where he attended college and worked at a group home for troubled kids.
Nearly two decades passed before Murray returned to an eligible job covered by his existing state retirement plan, when he won appointment to the state House of Representatives in 1995. For the next 18 years, Murray worked as a state lawmaker — 11 years as a representative and seven years as a senator — positions covered by his pension plan.
Under the old PERS plan, retirees like Murray who worked in elected jobs get to use a higher multiplying factor than most state employees — 3 percent instead of the 2 percent allowed under newer plans — when calculating pension benefits for those jobs. The old plan also lets members retire five years earlier than later PERS plans.
Still, Murray’s relatively low pay as a part-time state lawmaker largely limited his potential retirement benefits for most of his political career. While in the Legislature, Murray at times improved his income — and, in turn, his retirement outlook — by working second jobs also covered by his pension plan.
The King County public health department hired then-Rep. Murray in 1996 as a temporary program coordinator — a position he held until 1999. His prospective retirement pay also increased significantly while a senator from 2009 to 2013, when he simultaneously worked as a neighborhood outreach coordinator at the University of Washington — a PERS-covered job created amid deep budget cuts.
Moonlighting during that time helped Murray more than double his annual state earnings, which peaked at $97,739 in 2010. The second paycheck also would have boosted Murray’s yearly retirement pay by 98 percent to about $48,170 by the end of 2013, when he ran for mayor.
Ultimately, Murray’s increased pay from the UW job didn’t factor into his pension. Instead, his salary as mayor — which grew to more than $193,000 in 2016, his last full year on the job — was used to calculate and dramatically enhance his retirement benefits.
Had he never been mayor
As a state senator in 2008, Murray was earning about $42,000 annually when Jeff Simpson, his former foster son, alleged to some reporters and lawmakers that Murray had sexually abused him years earlier in Portland.
At the time, Oregon officials could not locate a 1984 state child-welfare investigation that concluded Murray had abused Simpson when the media asked for Simpson’s foster records. News organizations, including The Times, didn’t report about Simpson’s allegations then for lack of corroboration, and Murray’s political career continued.
After more allegations surfaced against Murray last year, Oregon officials found the 1984 records, releasing them in July. The Times’ reports about those records prompted Jeff Reading, Murray’s personal spokesman, to privately encourage González in calling for Murray’s resignation. Reading texted González that “we would not have Ed as mayor” had the Oregon records come to light in 2008.
At that time, Murray’s annual retirement pay would have amounted at most to $16,680 — about $99,240 a year less than what he’s paid in retirement today, according to calculations based on his pension data.
Murray and his husband, city parks executive Michael Shiosaki, 56, own two homes — one on Seattle’s Capitol Hill assessed at $876,000; the other in Seabrook, a beach community on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, assessed at $505,600.
He started work in December 1976 — a few months after leaving New York, after officials at a Catholic children’s group home where he had worked accused him of abusing a boy, according to two of his cousins.
At the time, Oregon officials could not locate a 1984 state child-welfare investigation that concluded Murray had abused Simpson when the media asked for Simpson’s foster records. News organizations, including The Times, didn’t report about Simpson’s allegations then for lack of corroboration, and Murray’s political career continued.
After more allegations surfaced against Murray last year, Oregon officials found the 1984 records, releasing them in July. The Times’ reports about those records prompted Jeff Reading, Murray’s personal spokesman, to privately encourage González in calling for Murray’s resignation. Reading texted González that “we would not have Ed as mayor” had the Oregon records come to light in 2008.
Drug addicted homosexual prostitute called a “hero” by.................
.............a lawyer.
Texts and emails reveal behind-the-scenes battles as Ed Murray tried to save his career
February 2, 2018 By Lewis Kamb and Jim Brunner
Seattle Times staff reporters
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/texts-and-emails-reveal-behind-the-scenes-battles-as-ed-murray-tried-to-save-his-career-as-seattle-mayor/
As accusations of sexual abuse of teens piled up against Seattle Mayor Ed Murray in 2017, he tried to fight back and rehabilitate his image. But a longtime confidant secretly pushed to “get the abuser out of office.”
On a Sunday afternoon in July, Seattle City Councilmember M. Lorena González told Mayor Ed Murray she planned to call for his resignation the next day. Within hours, she received a surprising phone call.
On the line was Jeff Reading, Murray’s personal spokesman, who had helped the mayor aggressively combat a series of child sexual-abuse allegations over the spring and summer.
“I expected it to be a call to dissuade me,” González recalled. “And he did not dissuade me.”
Instead, Reading, a political consultant who had worked with Murray since his days as a Democratic state senator, advised González “to be as bold as I could be,” she said.
The Seattle Times had just reported that an Oregon child-welfare investigator in 1984 concluded Murray had sexually abused his teenage foster son, Jeff Simpson. Moreover, officials
M. Lorena González, Seattle City Council member (Courtesy of M. Lorena González)
M. Lorena González, Seattle City Council member (Courtesy of M. Lorena González)
had asserted Murray should never again serve as a foster parent.
Behind Murray’s back, Reading cited the story and urged González in a series of text messages to correct “an accident of history” and get “the abuser out of office.”
“Isn’t that good for the city too?” he wrote. “To not have to keep reading about how your mayor abused minors?”
Reading’s messages — along with details from hundreds of pages of city emails, texts and other public records, and interviews with more than 20 people close to Murray’s administration — illuminate previously unrevealed crisis points in a career built on borrowed time:
Jeff Reading, a longtime Ed Murray spokesman and adviser (Courtesy of Jeff Reading)
Jeff Reading, a longtime Ed Murray spokesman and adviser (Courtesy of Jeff Reading)
A private meeting in 2012 to craft responses in the event sex-abuse allegations emerged. An accuser’s angry nighttime messages sent to the mayor’s office, prompting an alert to Murray’s attorney. Concerns from a city aide about the mayor’s efforts to involve city employees in his defense. And, during his final weeks in office, Murray’s attempts to rehabilitate his personal image.
Murray, who resigned in September, consistently has denied allegations by five men who say he sexually abused them as teenagers decades ago. He declined to be interviewed in person for this story, but answered some questions about Reading’s actions and other revelations through his attorney, Steve Fogg.
Ed Murray, former mayor of Seattle (Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times)
Ed Murray, former mayor of Seattle (Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times)
No other accusers?
In late summer 2012, Murray, then a powerful state senator eyeing a run for Seattle mayor, organized a meeting at his home on Capitol Hill. Joining him were Reading and Sandeep Kaushik, another longtime political consultant and lobbyist.
They wrestled with a thorny problem: How would Murray deal with his former foster son’s abuse claims should they crop up publicly during a mayoral campaign?
For hours, they war-gamed potential questions from reporters. Murray offered forceful denials, noting Oregon authorities had declined to file criminal charges when Simpson first accused Murray of repeatedly raping him in the 1980s. He also referred to a stack of records he kept that impugned Simpson as a manipulative criminal.
Murray pointed out that news media had opted not to run the story in 2008, after Simpson and another accuser, Lloyd Anderson, threatened a lawsuit and spoke with some reporters.
The consultants left satisfied with Murray’s explanations, and assurances he knew of no other potential accusers.
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Why we’re not allowing reader comments
Podcast: How our story came together
Complete coverage »
Through Fogg, Murray said the strategizing “wasn’t a summit meeting on (Simpson’s) allegations,” but a general assessment of potential political attacks he could face during the campaign.
Privately, Murray had feared similar allegations could jeopardize his career, his sister, Aileen Policros, said during an interview in September. At one point, when he was a state representative, Murray worried in a phone call to another sister that his cousin Joseph Dyer’s decades-old claim that Murray had sexually molested him might surface, said Policros, who rejects all allegations against her brother.
Murray, through Fogg, disputes having such worries, saying he hadn’t heard about Dyer’s allegations before September.
Regardless, Dyer’s claims — which other family members have said were known about for years — remained hidden as Murray ascended to the state Senate and became Democratic leader. By the close of 2013, Murray’s political stock had risen even higher, after he defeated incumbent Mike McGinn to become Seattle’s mayor.
“I still have nightmares”
“hey ED this is one of a few kids you molested,” began the note from Lloyd Anderson, the man who had joined Simpson in a short-lived pursuit of a civil lawsuit eight years earlier.
From a computer at his home in Florida, Anderson tapped out the angry message through a constituent-comment form on the mayor’s office website on June 2, 2015.
Coming midway through Murray’s term, the nighttime message sent alarms through the mayor’s office.
Anderson had met Murray in the late 1970s at a Portland children’s group home where Murray was a counselor. He claimed Murray later paid him for sex when Anderson was a teenager.
In his message, Anderson asked if Murray remembered “slapping me around and then making me perform oral sex on you?”
He added: “I want you to know that even after 20 years of marriage and two children and a halfway decent life I still have nightmares about what you did to me and jeff.”
Three days later, Anderson fired off another note, saying his therapist had told him “Seattle should know all about their mayor.” He threatened to call reporters. “Ed I am glad that you have made a difference and have done a lot of good, but does the good outweigh the bad? Lets ask the media. God bless.”
In an interview last year, Anderson said he recalled sending the messages, but “never got anything back.”
Murray had long denied Anderson’s claims to his confidants.
Chris Gregorich, Murray’s chief of staff at the time, said the mayor’s office didn’t respond to Anderson, but notified Murray and his Portland attorney, Katherine Heekin.
Murray “didn’t take any action on that,” Fogg added, because Anderson “wasn’t making a complaint that had anything to do with city business.”
Despite his threat to go public, Anderson said, he didn’t speak with any reporters at the time.
Zoom
Accusations rise, political options shrink
Heading into 2017, Murray was riding high as mayor, having amassed political victories including a $15-an-hour city minimum wage and voter approval for major transportation and housing levies. He was gaining national attention as a leader in the liberal political resistance to President Donald Trump.
The path to re-election looked smooth.
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That all changed in April, when Delvonn Heckard, a recovering drug addict, filed a lawsuit accusing the mayor of raping and sexually abusing him decades earlier. The same day, The Times published similar accusations by Anderson and Simpson.
Murray vehemently denied the abuse claims and hired a prominent attorney to fight Heckard’s lawsuit. Behind the scenes, he tapped political allies and pushed his city aides to help him mount a defense.
Shortly after a fourth man came forward in May to allege similar abuse, Murray announced he would not seek re-election, but vowed to finish his term.
Doubt swirled about his accusers’ motivations after Heckard withdrew his lawsuit in June, even though he promised to refile it once he completed drug treatment. Murray said he had been vindicated. He considered a late write-in campaign, but dropped the idea after commissioning a poll.
He and his allies weighed how he could land work after leaving office.
In a July text exchange with Murray, Seattle Department of Transportation Director Scott Kubly pitched a possibility.
“I have an act 2 idea,” Kubly texted the mayor.
“Interesting,” Murray responded.
“I think you (should) replace Peter,” Kubly wrote.
Kubly was referring to Peter Rogoff, executive director of Sound Transit. (A spokesman for Rogoff said last month Rogoff wasn’t aware of Kubly’s idea for Murray, nor does Rogoff have plans to leave the transit authority.)
Murray’s talk with Kubly about replacing Rogoff wasn’t serious, Fogg said.
“That was all just said in jest between (Murray) and Scott,” Fogg said. “Ed hasn’t taken any steps to pursue that idea.”
The text messages fly
The prospect of Murray landing any high-profile job after leaving office — or even serving out his term — took a major hit in mid-July.
“Ed Murray abused foster son, investigator concluded in 1984,” said the Sunday, July 16, Times front-page headline.
After reading the story detailing the findings of the abuse probe in Oregon, González, the City Council member who’d previously worked as Murray’s legal counsel, felt she had to act.
“I represented victims of sexual assault and abuse in the past,” she said in a recent interview, “and if I were in the position of having an opportunity to talk to Mr. Simpson — if he came into my office and asked me to consider taking his case — would I take it? The answer to that question was yes.”
González turned to political consultant Christian Sinderman for advice on making a public call for Murray’s resignation. Sinderman, who also had worked for Murray and considered him a friend, recalled feeling “caught in the middle” but nonetheless supported González’s approach.
When she informed Murray of her plans, González said the mayor told her he didn’t deserve to be forced from office.
“He began to talk about his suffering and how difficult that this has been for him and he just wanted to finish out his term on, you know, his terms,” she recalled.
Later, González said she was struggling with how to frame a statement when she received a call from Reading, a confidant of Murray’s for more than a decade.
“This was ‘a mistake in history’ that needed to be corrected,” González recalled Reading telling her.
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
1 of 10
Excerpts of text conversation between Murray confidant Jeff Reading and Councilmember M. Lorena González
He pressed the case in a text: “Someone who has been disqualified to be a foster parent in the state of Oregon should be disqualified from being mayor in the city of Seattle — regardless of when that determination is brought to light …
“Seattle should not have a child abuser as mayor because of a clerical mishap, no matter how much time is left in his administration.”
Reading wasn’t done. The next day, he wrote to González: “Seriously, who wants a mayor that CPS says sexually abused a minor and should never be put in that position again? It’s astounding that Ed has had a 20 year career in elected office. These records should have disqualified him …”
Reading wondered to González whether other City Council members would “come around” to support her position on Murray’s resignation.
“I don’t know,” she responded. “Ed worked Bruce [Harrell], Sally [Bagshaw] and Debora [Juarez] pretty hard yesterday.”
Still, González predicted Councilmembers Rob Johnson, Tim Burgess, Lisa Herbold and Kshama Sawant eventually would join her call for Murray to step down.
Murray separately worried González’s plea would win support.
Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
“I think council might go there and I am already on the brink of financial disaster,” he texted that Monday to former Deputy Mayor Andrea Riniker.
His chief of staff, Mike Fong, quickly gauged support for Murray among other council members. Bagshaw assured him in a text that a “response to Lorena is circulating.”
“I think we will get 5 votes,” she added. “I think you will like it.”
“Thank you. This is very helpful and supportive,” Fong texted back. “It will help put some brakes on what was starting to look like a runaway train.”
“Shame on those who want a political witch hunt for their own political gain,” Bagshaw responded.
In the end, only Sawant joined González’s call for resignation.
Bagshaw did not respond to recent requests for comment about her text exchanges with Fong.
Fong resigned as Murray’s chief of staff about a month later, taking a job with King County Executive Dow Constantine before returning to City Hall late last year as a deputy to newly elected Mayor Jenny Durkan.
Reading declined to comment for this story, except to say that he was no longer under professional contract to Murray’s campaign at the time of his text exchanges.
Fighting accusations, launching image rehab
In late July, Murray orchestrated a defense to hold onto his job. He solicited advice from former Seattle Mayor Charles Royer, who offered to write a letter co-signed by three other Seattle ex-mayors defending Murray against resignation talk.
The mayor also asked some staff members to help him beat back the widening scandal, at one point requesting help researching Oregon laws related to foster parenting, according to a person familiar with the requests.
With assistance from city aides, Ian Warner, the mayor’s legal counsel, kept the mayor apprised of the media’s requests for records related to the scandal. The mayor’s executive assistant forwarded some of the reporters’ requests to Murray’s private attorney, Robert Sulkin.
Murray’s requests made at least one city employee uncomfortable, according to public records.
Ed Murray’s foster-parent file, recovered from an Oregon Department of Human Services’ field office following a Seattle Times public records request, contains reports showing a child-welfare investigator concluded Murray sexually abused his foster son in the early 1980s. Source: Oregon Department of Human Services.
Ed Murray’s foster-parent file, recovered from an Oregon Department of Human Services’ field office following a Seattle Times public records request, contains reports showing a child-welfare investigator concluded Murray sexually abused his foster son in the early 1980s. Source: Oregon Department of Human Services.
In late July, Joe Mirabella, a spokesman for the city’s economic-development office, sought advice from Susan Coskey, the city’s human-resources director, emails show.
“I hesitate to put anything in writing but I need some clarity on the boundaries for some issues I’ve been asked to help on which seem inappropriate to me,” Mirabella wrote. “I think you can imagine.”
Coskey set up a meeting. Emails show she contacted Warner, but the city withheld contents of those messages when releasing public records requested by reporters, citing attorney-client privilege. No formal personnel investigation was launched.
Mirabella, who still works for the city, declined to comment for this story.
Through his attorney, Murray said he was careful to keep city work separate from personal tasks to help defend him against the allegations. “That wasn’t his expectation or desire that city employees would work on (his defense) on city time,” Fogg said.
By late summer, Murray also was looking beyond the final months of his term, seeking to rebuild his tattered public image with the help of friends.
Paul Anderson, CEO of the Seattle-based talent-management firm Workhouse Media, sent a message to his friend Murray’s personal email account describing a “Confidential Strategic Process” to get “a personal branding process underway.”
They’d start out with Murray completing a questionnaire, known as a Birkman Assessment, to determine his personal strengths and needs, followed by a meeting with a renowned local leadership coach, Beroz Ferrell, according to a string of emails released under public-disclosure laws.
The emails show Murray undertaking the rebranding effort in late August and early September.
Nonetheless, Murray last month claimed his work with Anderson took place only after he left the mayor’s office. “It was just a 20-minute test,” Fogg said. “That all happened after he resigned. Paul reached out to him through a mutual friend.”
Also aiding the effort was Martha Choe, a former chief administrative officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who had served as a Seattle City Council member in the 1990s. Murray had worked for her as a council aide.
In an email to Ferrell, Choe said she’d “done work with Ed” for more than a year based on feedback “related to his management and communications styles.”
Murray quickly completed the questionnaire, and Ferrell and Choe worked with the mayor’s official scheduler to set up a late-September meeting to go over the results.
But Murray’s plans changed Sept. 12.
Late that morning, The Times informed Reading it planned to report that Dyer, Murray’s cousin, had alleged in interviews and a sworn affidavit that Murray molested him when he was 13, in the mid-1970s.
Murray denied the allegations in a phone call with reporters and insisted he would not resign. After the call ended, Murray met with advisers in his office.
Within two hours, the mayor announced he would step down the next day.
Dyer’s accusations, known among Murray’s extended family for decades, shocked his longtime allies.
“I don’t think there was a single person who wasn’t blindsided by that,” Sinderman said. “I guarantee you nobody knew.”
On Sept. 13, as the media gathered at City Hall for Council President Harrell’s swearing-in as interim mayor, Murray’s staff stayed mostly behind closed doors.
Some reporters wondered: Would Murray make a statement? Was he even there?
But the outgoing mayor wasn’t at City Hall, and hadn’t been all day.
A few hours after the news broke about his cousin a day earlier, Seattle’s 53rd mayor left the city with his husband. They headed to their beach home in Seabrook, on the Olympic Peninsula, where Murray spent his final day as the city’s chief executive. Joining them at the beach was a Seattle police officer — one of two officers to be assigned over the next 10 nights at city expense to provide out-of-town security to the former mayor.
The day after his resignation, Murray emailed his former executive assistant with a request:
“Could you pack all my Mayor note cards, pads, and pins?” he asked. “It is a bit of a outgoing elected tradition.”
Late that morning, The Times informed Reading it planned to report that Dyer, Murray’s cousin, had alleged in interviews and a sworn affidavit that Murray molested him when he was 13, in the mid-1970s.
Murray denied the allegations in a phone call with reporters and insisted he would not resign. After the call ended, Murray met with advisers in his office.
Within two hours, the mayor announced he would step down the next day.
Why do these Freaks pursue Office and how do they get elected?
Is that how they plan on staying out of Prison?
So much for intelligence of seattle voters.so now corrupt politicians have invaded the SJW voters bloc.
Liberal progressive ROT at its best
Seattle = 1st World Sh*thole. Liberals ruin everything they touch.
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