Millennium’S Worth Of Crud In Year 2000

This time last winter, it seemed like half of Spokane’s denizens were shuddering in their Sorels over what havoc the coming millennium might bring.

Nervous Nellies endured lines longer than a Russian bread sale to buy up gas generators, dried foods, flashlight batteries and case after case of toilet paper.

Civilization, they believed, was on the verge of Y2 chaos.

The year 2000 was a disaster in Spokane, all right, but not because of computer gremlins.

Our problems were caused by some all-too-real human monsters.

Speaking as a Spokane lifer, I can’t remember a more monumental grime wave than the last 12 months.

There was Robert Lee Yates Jr., the South Hill father of five who murdered at least 13 people, most of them Spokane prostitutes. He buried one of his victims a few feet outside his bedroom window.

There was landlord Stanley Pietrzak, who strangled and dismembered one of his tenants. Police found her charred bones in the apartment’s furnace. If that isn’t chilling enough, there is a suspicion that Pietrzak may have served tenants stew containing the woman’s remains.

There was Brad Jackson, who smothered his 9-year-old daughter. He was caught after exhuming and reburying the girl’s corpse to fool police.

There was JoAnn Peterson, finally nailed this year for the 1991 shotgun murder of her son-in-law. Hiding in the shadows, the grandmother blasted the Spokane Valley man in the face.

There were the members of a Spokane Valley sadomasochist club who stand accused of abducting Japanese college students for videotaped rape.

“Never can I remember anything even coming close to what this community went through in 2000,” says Jack O’Brien, 79, a former Spokane city councilman and lifelong resident.

I called O’Brien and some others to see if they thought Spokane 2000 set a bad news record.

They did. But don’t ask O’Brien for an explanation.

“Was it coincidence? Was it a sign of a declining society?” he wonders. “I’m not a sociologist, so I wouldn’t have any idea what caused it.”

Whatever it was, you can bet Spokane 2000 will be analyzed for years to come.

The cases “are all so bizarre,” says Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker, whose department was saddled with seeking justice in all of this. “For them to all come together the same year is pretty amazing.”

Associated Press writer Nick Geranios wrote a recent story detailing all of the above and more. This was also the year, he notes, in which three small boys burned to death in a house fire.

I had forgotten that one. You know it’s been a horrible year when you can forget something like that.

Last month, the boys’ mother, Jamesetta Shealeay, was charged with three counts of second-degree manslaughter. Prosecutors contend the cough medicine given to the kids to calm them down made them too sleepy to flee the blaze.

“I can think of some horrendous crimes, but not multiplied one after the other,” says Dick Hoover, a former KREM news anchor who taught me journalism in the early 1970s at Eastern Washington University.

“This was really something.”

It was, but crime alone can’t be blamed for the unmerry mood of many Spokane residents. O’Brien believes our constantly bickering City Council has also had a demoralizing effect on us all.

Every week, it’s trench warfare down at City Hall as our representatives nearly come to blows over River Park Square, the paying of various legal bills and whatever has Councilman Steve Eugster’s shorts in a knot at the moment.

“I’ve been in and around this community nearly all my life, and I’ve never experienced such a decline in community morale,” O’Brien adds. “People are getting real cynical about the situation.”

But there is a strong mayor about to be sworn in. Most of the aforementioned criminal cases have been adjudicated.

You have to wonder, will Spokane 2001 be happier?

“Without a doubt,” predicts O’Brien. “There’s just no way it could be any worse.”