Jewish Federation shooting trial begins

SEATTLE – The man accused of shooting up the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006, killing one woman and wounding five, was not insane but had a deliberate plan to make a blood-soaked political point, a prosecutor said Monday as the man’s trial began.

Naveed Haq, 32, of Kennewick, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of murder and attempted murder in the July 2006 attack, during which he walked through the Jewish center’s downtown Seattle office, ranting against Israel and the Iraq war as he fired, hitting some people at their cubicles and killing Pamela Waechter as she fled down a stairwell. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

King County Deputy Prosecutor Erin Ehlert told jurors in her opening statement that Haq’s careful preparation belied his insanity claim. He made four trips to gun shops in the weeks beforehand and used the Internet to map the 227-mile trip from his parents’ home in Pasco to the center.

“He thought about what he did. He planned what he did,” Ehlert told the jurors.

Even when a police officer stopped him for a traffic violation minutes before the shooting, he and the officer had “a normal conversation in a normal tone of voice,” she said.

But John Carpenter, one of Haq’s attorneys, called the shootings “the acts of a madman,” and said they came “not from a darkened heart, but from a diseased mind.”

Carpenter said the defense would present volumes of mental health files, showing Haq’s bipolar, schizophrenic and psychotic tendencies. He had grandiose thoughts, heard voices from inanimate objects and suffered paranoid delusions, and Carpenter said those mental health problems turned Haq from a promising student – the only person in his high school class to get into an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania – into someone who couldn’t hold down an hourly wage job.

If nothing else, the notion that Haq thought he could reverse the course of U.S. foreign policy showed his irrationality, Carpenter said: “He actually thought his actions were going to have a positive societal effect. This is insanity.”

One expert retained by Haq’s lawyers is expected to testify that Haq met the legal definition of insanity: that he could not appreciate the quality of his actions and did not know right from wrong at the time of the shooting. Norm Maleng, the late King County prosecutor, decided not to seek the death penalty because of Haq’s history of mental illness.