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| Cafe Racer to take a moment |
When Ian Stawicki started shooting at a Seattle cafe in a spree rampage that would leave him and five others dead, one man stood up and tried to stop him by hurling coffeehouse stools at the gunman, police said on Thursday.
Seattle Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel described the shooting, which was caught on video, as erupting seemingly without warning amid typical mid-morning coffeehouse activity.
Pugel did not name the man.
ACTING ERRATICALLY Police said that roughly half an hour after the late-morning cafe shooting, in which four people died, the gunman fatally shot a woman and stole her sport utility vehicle in another part of the city, before ultimately abandoning it, leaving one of his two guns inside.
Stawicki has also been described as mentally disturbed, and police said an acquaintance he contacted after the cafe shooting told police he was talking nonsense.
Once the acquaintance heard news of the shooting, that person contacted police. When police finally tracked Stawicki down, he knelt and shot himself in the head, police said.
I'm grieving for him, I'm grieving for his mother, I'm grieving for his brother," Stawicki said of his eldest son, who he said had long had a concealed weapons permit.
Someone inside an artsy Seattle cafe where a gunman opened fire threw stools at the assailant during a shooting rampage police described as "callous, horrific and cold," a move that allowed others to run to safety.
Ian Lee Stawicki was armed with two .45-caliber handguns and began shooting Wednesday morning at
Cafe Racer, killing four people. Stawicki later killed himself as police closed in.
Picked up another stool, as the suspect is shooting and now pointing (a gun) at him and hits him with another stool," Assistant Chief Jim Pugel said.
The man told police he picked up the stool and threw it, legs first, as the shots rang out.
The Seattle Times late Thursday identified the man who fought back as Lawrence Adams, 56.
"The hero is Leonard," Adams said. Meuse was upgraded from critical to serious condition Thursday at Harborview Medical Center.
Police late Thursday released 911 tapes from the shootings, including one from a man who phoned authorities from inside a bathroom at the cafe.
"Somebody came in and shot a bunch of people. Initially, it doesn't appear that the dispatcher understands that the man is in the cafe. "I can see people laying on the floor," the man says. "People are bleeding all over the place."
The dispatcher asks for more information.
"Sir, sir. "We have people alive, barely alive here, do you have people coming?" the other man asks.
I just hope they understand he wasn't a monster out to kill people."
Skoog said he’d seen the man identified as the shooter around the bar from time to time, hanging out in the alley “a little out of sight.”
Here’s Skoog writing about the Café Racer and its vibe:
Café Racer is a storefront joint which can be a café, diner, bar or music hall depending on the time of day and who you are; it often operates as all four at once, with each room serving a different role: cartoonists with coffees sketching at their well-lit table upstairs, Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Cuong Vu warming up on stage, painters and poets elbowed up at the bar, neighbors eating grilled cheese and sipping tomato soup by the window, pharmacy students studying in the Obama Room beside Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” rendered in yarn.
The café is full of art, as “Seattle’s Official Bad Art Museum of Art,” but the bar is set high for inclusion, and sympathy is extended to each artists’ bad decision Café Racer celebrates the artistic impulse and the “Bad Art” designation is merely a gentle chiding. The window blinds are old pull-down maps from lost classrooms, the maps themselves out of date, showing the old borders, the old names, and have to be repaired regularly by the manger, Ben, with packing tape and a sigh.
The upstairs room feels like a basement rec-room, with some old soft chairs from which it may be difficult to rise.
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