May 8, 2005 in City

Rodgers: West used city office

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Spokane Mayor Jim West confided to a city councilwoman Thursday that he masturbated in his City Hall office during an online chat on a gay Web site.

“He wanted to kind of bare his soul … He wanted to give me a heads-up,” City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers said Saturday in describing a conversation she had with West.

West’s admission led Rodgers on Saturday to renew her call for West to resign as mayor, an independent elected position he has held since January 2004. A recall election would require 12,567 signatures of registered voters.

Other council members, however, continue to say that any decision about resignation should be left to West.

Also Saturday, a Spokane man told The Spokesman-Review that West and former sheriff’s Deputy David Hahn “checked out” boys from Morning Star Boys Ranch for day outings and camping trips in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

West was seen Saturday playing golf at Esmeralda Golf Course, but he could not be reached for comment.

Rodgers said West told her about masturbating in his City Hall office when he called her Thursday morning. Rodgers had just finished talking on a radio program about the allegations of child sexual abuse and abuse of public office against West, reported in Thursday’s Spokesman-Review.

Immediately after her 6 a.m. radio interview on KXLY-AM, West called her, Rodgers said.

In the conversation, she said, he denied allegations by two men who told the newspaper that he abused them as young boys in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. West repeated his denial later that day in a brief press conference at City Hall in which he refused to take any questions.

But in their conversation, Rodgers said West acknowledged using a city computer to engage in Internet sex in his mayoral office.

“He said, we masturbated,” Rodgers said. “He called it ‘mutual masturbation’ … a term I hadn’t really heard before,” she said.

“I told him, your private life is your private life. I just have a hard time with your using city computers. He said, I know, I know,” she said.

Rodgers said she told the mayor he’d still remain her friend.

She said West may have chosen her for his confession because they’d recently had dinner at Panda Express, where he talked about growing up in Spokane.

Since the allegations against West were revealed Thursday, national media stories have portrayed Spokane as an All-American city with a “homophobic” mayor who admits he’s gay, Rodgers said.

“It’s hypocritical. And he says he’s not going to step down. But he should for the sake of the city,” she added.

The sexual abuse claims against West include alleged incidents that date back more than 25 years to a time when West was a close friend of the late David Hahn. The two were both Spokane County sheriff’s deputies and co-Scoutmasters of Troop 345 and lived near each other.

Dick Walters, Hahn’s brother-in-law and a self-described “staunch Republican,” spoke publicly for the first time Saturday. Walters told The Spokesman-Review that he knows West and Hahn took boys from Morning Star Boys Ranch on camping trips and day outings in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Walters said he has no evidence that sexual abuse occurred when West and Hahn, working as volunteers, spent time with Morning Star boys. But he said he is now convinced that his late brother-in-law, who committed suicide in August 1981, was a pedophile.

The statement by Walters contradicts a statement made earlier this week by Morning Star spokeswoman P.J. Watters, who said West never had contact with boys at the facility.

When contacted Saturday, the spokeswoman said, “I am about as shocked about this as everyone else.” She said her earlier comment was in relation to West’s work during the past 12 years as a member of the facility’s board of directors. “I knew nothing about this.”

On Friday, West resigned from the facility’s board, one day after stepping down from the executive board of the Inland Northwest Council of the Boy Scouts.

Hahn’s brother-in-law, a geologist and mining company executive who voted for West in 2003, told the newspaper he has concerns about West.

“I believe these young men who are coming forward now and claiming West has abused them,” Dick Walters said. “I feel very uncomfortable with Jim West as our mayor. I think he should step down.”

Walters was referring to allegations from Robert J. Galliher and Michael G. Grant Jr., first published in Thursday’s editions of The Spokesman-Review. Galliher and Grant claim they were sexually abused by both Hahn and West in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Both men, now in their 30s, said they were introduced to West by Hahn and were supplied marijuana to smoke in Hahn’s South Hill apartment by the sheriff’s deputies.

Walters said he suspects the abuse Galliher and Grant may have experienced as boys “may have damaged their lives,” leading to crime and drug addiction.

Morning Star currently is home to 18 boys, placed there privately and by the state of Washington, which licenses and monitors the facility.

Morning Star opened in January 1957 and has housed 1,277 boys over the years. Its director, the Rev. Joe Weitensteiner, has the name of every boy who lived there in a log book he keeps, Watters said.

She said she was sure the facility still has records showing which boys may have gone on outings with West and Hahn.

“We’re all about protecting these boys, so this is so unfortunate,” she said. Watters promised to look into the matter further when Weitensteiner returns from out of town.

Hahn and West received a federal grant in 1977 to take a group of troubled juvenile offenders to a weeklong campout at Diamond Lake, but it’s not clear if any of those boys were from Morning Star.

Walters, Hahn’s brother-in-law, said he is struck by the similarities in the lives of West and Hahn.

“I don’t know where David and Jim met, but I know they both were involved in taking boys from the ranch on outings,” Walters said. “David sat right here in my kitchen and told me that.”

Walters grew up in the same Shadle Park neighborhood as Hahn and remembered meeting Hahn when he was 8. In 1963, Walters began dating Hahn’s older sister, Janice, and the two later married.

His wife, who has declined to talk publicly about her late brother, is troubled by current news reports centering on Hahn’s friendship with the man who is now Spokane’s mayor, Walters said.

Hahn and West, who were both raised in Spokane, “had totally parallel lives,” said Walters, 61.

“They both were in the military. David was a Green Beret, and Jim was a paratrooper,” Walters said.

“They both went to Gonzaga University, they both became sheriff’s deputies and they both became Scout leaders together and lived close to each other.

“They both had very proud, similar public lives, and both of them appeared to me to have this dark side, very similar private lives. It’s my opinion that they both knew about each other’s private life,” he said. “It’s my belief they may have even participated in each other’s private activities.”

He also wanted to let the public know that his late brother-in-law, “like Jim West,” had many admirable attributes.

“David had a very loving family, particularly his mother, Virginia, and his two sisters,” Walters said.

“As a boy, David never could do anything right in his father’s eyes,” and began to stutter, Walters said. The father, a tennis instructor, “abandoned the family” and eventually divorced Virginia Hahn. She was 89 when she died a few years ago.

Hahn got involved in a ham radio club and Boy Scouts, “looking for that father figure who was missing in his life,” Walters said. “I believe he was abused by someone either in the ham radio club or the Scouts. I think that’s what started this.”

But as a young man, Hahn never talked about being abused. “I just know that a lot of people who are abused as children grow up to become abusers.”

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