In Seattle, building a city of brothers

SEATTLE – Capitol Hill is all murals of Indigenous people on the walls, Black Lives Matter posters in the windows. The colors of the rainbow flag are painted into the crosswalks. An iridescent balloonlike art installation hovers, seemingly untethered, in the unseasonably blue sky. Soft salsa music plays from an open storefront and a distinct hip-hop bass line licks in the distance. 

Love is everywhere, everything seems to say: On the ground beneath my feet, floating above me, everywhere I look. Strange to think this city’s heart is broken, until I feel it. 

I’ve come to Seattle to look for somebody. His name is Elijah. Elijah Lee Lewis. 

I’m too late, of course. He’s already gone, victim to our most American contagion. But I’m looking still, knowing I must be able to find him somewhere.

It’s here, on Capitol Hill, that people started the CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) or the CHAZ (the Autonomous Zone). I know Lewis was here after George Floyd died. People took over. Pitched tents. Protested. Played music and handed out food and talked police reform on bullhorns. It was peaceful, mostly, until two shootings at the edge of the zone, one fatal. 

I know there must be signs of him, here on Capitol Hill, or at the arts and cultural center on Seattle Boulevard. In an open-air market in the South End. Or somewhere out on the shore of Lake Washington, where children toddle at the water’s edge.

I’ve seen the videos of the memorials. Flowers laid out in grief. Stuffed animals. Balloons. I’ve seen pictures of the signs – “Love is Elijah Lewis” – and the words spelled out in tealights – “ELIJAH WE ❤ U.”

Still, somehow, I don’t see one here now, where college students ride out the last classes of the year, where kids have traded their hooded sweatshirts for T-shirts on a sunny spring day.

Here on Pine Street, children with their mothers bite into cold treats at Molly Moon’s ice cream. Car tires clunk over the streetcar tracks. Someone whizzes by on a scooter. 

Just across the street, Cal Anderson Park meanders upslope, 7 acres of green space named for Washington’s first openly gay legislator. Skateboards scrape on the ramps. I can’t see Lewis here, but I know he was here, in 2018.

Seventeen people died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Valentine’s Day 2018. Within weeks, students everywhere were marching for their lives. 

Elijah Lewis was barely 18 then, a high school kid still searching for his own voice. He found it, right here on Capitol Hill.  

“We are not afraid,” he said, stepping up to the mic in that way that made sense in the moment but will say so much more, years later.

“Before you write any bills, before you make any decisions on guns, think about your children,” he said – to the crowd, to the legislators in Olympia perhaps, to everybody. “Think about your grandchildren and think about their children because whatever you write now will affect generations to come.”   

Elijah Lewis would spend the next five years using that voice. 

He spoke, he moved in a way that made him relatable to children, to his peers, to elders. He wanted everybody to have a slice of the pie, to succeed. He shouted when others remained silent. He cared about people. 

He would help save landmarks of Black history, found a theater, launch four small businesses, blast out big emails with big ideas in the middle of the night. He would send friends off to college, help friends bury loved ones.

He would spend the next five years collecting a cityful of brothers. 

He would wonder aloud about the number of people he knew who had already been murdered. He would help recruit hundreds of people to sign a pledge designed to save everyone else from a similar fate.

He would revel in the I-have-arrived trappings of his own apartment. He would dress in stylish jackets. He would laugh, and dance, and rave about his momma’s spaghetti cooking. He would take his red Camry up to his sister’s place on Capitol Hill to see some very important relatives. 

“I've got a niece and nephew right now,” Lewis said that day in the park, when he was just 18 years old. “And I have to think: If this is this crazy now, how crazy is it going to be when they turn 18? They're 6 and 3 right now, so that's why I'm here today."

He would only get five more years before he encountered the man with the gun. A bullet would end his life. 

Before you make any decisions on guns, think about your children. 

So I’m in Seattle looking for Elijah Lewis. 

I’ll scour court paperwork for the details of a shooting I will never comprehend, and be sickened by what I discover.

I’ll search the streets for signs of Lewis that I can’t see, and I will find his brothers.

You didn’t have to do a lot to become Lewis’ brother. If you were considered his friend, you were considered his family. 

Lewis’ brothers weren’t just Black people. He had Latino brothers and white brothers and Indian brothers. Brothers and sisters. I have come to Seattle to meet them. And I will find Elijah Lee Lewis everywhere. 

I meet Elijah Lewis’ mother at Gene Coulon Memorial Beach Park in nearby Renton. It is a picture perfect day, especially for finicky May in Washington. The thermometer caresses 80 degrees. The sun lays a cozy cloak upon my shoulders. 

I see sweet toddlers, colorful floaties around their tiny arms, frolicking along the southeastern shoreline of Lake Washington. They dip their feet in cold water before retreating in shock. But these babies cannot stay away from the alluring ripples. They tip-toe in again and again, shrieking and stumbling back into their parents’ warm arms.  

This park is built for families. Jenine Lewis used to bring her children here when they were young. 

I’m sitting with her here, now, two days before Mother’s Day. 

She and Elijah would walk the park for hours, discover nature, blow off some steam. He had so much energy, from the very beginning.

Jenine Lewis’ personal life has been complicated. Since high school, she realized she liked Black boys. She started dating one when she was 15. Her mother did not approve and eventually disowned her daughter when she realized the attraction was more than a phase. Jenine left home and turned to alcohol to soothe her pain.

“My uncles were making threats against him,” Jenine Lewis tells me about her first boyfriend. “I love my mother, but she kicked me out of the house.”

Jenine tried to date a white man – it failed miserably – before meeting the father of her first two children, Mario and Quincy. A third child, A.C., was born three years later. The family struggled, moving frequently in the South End and the Skyway neighborhood and surviving on government assistance. Jenine wanted to clean up her life. Seek better relationships. She became a born-again Christian and turned to the church for support. She felt it grounded her. 

Jenine married Arthur Lewis, and immediately, Elijah was on the way. A few months later, Arthur dropped dead from a heart attack – in front of his wife and stepchildren. Jenine was alone again. When Elijah was born, they called him a miracle baby.

Family life was defined by the calendar, and the calendar was ruled by church. Saturdays, volunteer feeding the homeless. Sundays, service. Mondays, Jenine led an AA meeting at church. Tuesdays, Bible study. Wednesdays, women’s fellowship. Thursdays, hours of phone calls on the prayer line. Fridays, prayer meetings, 9 p.m. to midnight. 

Talk to Jenine’s children today and they’ll tell you the complicated story of a childhood in the space between loss and faith, between poverty and devotion. “We were outside speaking to people about God, to the homeless, to everyone,” Mario Dunham will tell me. “From when we were young, my mom instilled service in us.” 

But the church and its rules could be suffocating, too. As he aged, Elijah became angry – angry at the strict rules of the church, angry about the loss of his father, angry that they were poor, sister Quincy Dunham, 32. Their mother poured everything they had into church, and when they had so little, it was easy for growing children to see what they lived without. “These are the things that made Elijah who he was,” Quincy will tell me. “This is why he fought so fiercely for people.”

His sister would tell him: “I expect you to do exactly what you’re doing because you are the best of all of us.”

The church gave their mother another resource, though. It had a predominantly Black congregation. 

It was important to this white woman to raise four Black children who would come to understand their world. She had them read about African American history and struggle. She put them in front of Black people who could serve as a village of discovery – no easy feat in a city that’s less than 7% Black. She wanted “a well-rounded perspective.”

“And not my perspective,” she tells me. “That was what I was trying not to do.”

As Elijah grew, his older siblings were already building their own lives. Mario left for the Air Force. Quincy, who in many ways was a second mother to Elijah, had two children of her own, Elijah’s niece and nephew.

It was often just the two of them, Jenine and Elijah, and money was short. They spent a lot of time at the library. The Seattle Aquarium. And here at Coulon Beach. Elijah was obsessed with animals. Fish. Bearded dragons. Rabbits. Cats. “It felt like we had a farm,” she says.

“There's a scripture in the Bible that says, ‘Raise up a child in the way they should go, and in the end, they won’t depart,’” Jenine Lewis, 60, says. She is faithful in the way that leads someone to learn not just a proverb, but the variations of it in different versions of the Bible. 

“The Amplified Version talks about ‘according to their bent,’” she says, “so with each one of my children, that wording hit really hard in my spirit. Whatever their interests were, I would just nurture that bent – that’s their personality, their essence, their skills.”

Elijah’s personality, his skills. His reasons for moving with purpose the way he did. I came to Seattle looking for that essence.  

My heart aches when I ask her about April 1. That’s the day she got the phone call. 

Every mother has had a phone call. Jenine’s children have been in car accidents before. They’ve always walked away. She knew this call was different. A mother knows.  

This time, it was Elijah’s friend calling, to give her the phone number for a police detective. 

Jenine knew where Elijah had been headed that day. He was with his nephew, Jenine’s grandson. 

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, my grandson, also,’” she says.  

The officer on the line had a gentle spirit. Jenine wishes she could remember the woman’s name. 

“She said, ‘Ma’am, there was an incident involving your son. You need to get to the hospital.’ 

“I just said, ‘Is he dead?’ And she said, ‘Yes, ma’am, he’s dead. Your grandson is OK.’”

I am on a journey with Edd Hampton Parks, Elijah Lewis’ best friend. Parks, 30, has agreed to show me Lewis’ Seattle. 

The two met when Lewis was still in school at Rainier Beach High, and Parks was visiting schools and working with a grassroots group called Brothers United in Leadership Development.

Parks, a few years older, at first didn’t realize Lewis was a student. 

“Because he was wearing a suit,” Parks says, laughing. “He rolled up on me all confident and with a smile.”

Lewis, though in a suit, was far from a nerd. His hair would fluctuate from a tight fade to a blown-out afro to twists. He was a Black man and proud of it. He loved to dance and had a wicked, if goofy, sense of humor. 

He told Parks he was starting businesses of his own. The two lost touch. Then, two years later, George Floyd was murdered, and they found themselves in the mutual space of protest and activism. An unintentional bond blossomed into brotherhood.

Parks and I start outside Lewis’ blue high-rise apartment building. It’s the first place he lived on his own. 

“He was so proud of it, too,” Parks says. “Every time I came over, he was like, ‘Check this out, I just bought this, I just put this up.’ It was really funny, but I was happy for him. He loved his spot.”  

It has a roof-top hot tub. Even in Seattle, no matter how rainy or cold, he spent his limited free time there. He called his friends while soaking. A week before he died, he hosted his mother and some friends for a spaghetti dinner at his apartment. 

Across the street, Othello neighborhood park sprawls down the hill for more than 7 acres. We walk there, with couples and their designer dogs, as Parks explains how Lewis organized Othello Marketplace. Every Sunday, business vendors set up tents and food stands, particularly entrepreneurs of color, to hawk their goods in an open-air market. And there was always a stage, a platform for young talent from the neighborhood to share their music with the community.  

Walking Lewis’ Seattle with his best friend, I can see him. He moderated various candidate forums. He attached himself to community groups and nonprofits. And the businesses he talked about in high school became real. A cleaning company that turned to disinfecting offices during the pandemic. A funeral arrangement establishment that catered to Black clientele. A financial literacy program to help African Americans build their credit ratings and their legacies. An artist development firm to help empower and elevate up-and-coming creatives.

“He was really focused on being an inspiration,” Parks says. ”He really wanted to show Black people that you don’t have to fold into the mold.”

There’s a term for the thing Lewis was building. I know it, and Parks knows it. It’s called the “pull-up” culture. Wherever you’re at, pull up to your people and for your people in whatever way you can. Be intentional about showing support. 

Lewis marched in the streets for change, but when a lot of people look at those marches, they don’t see what Parks saw. Parks – and his best friend – wanted people around them to see beyond what was expected of them as Black men, as Black folks.

It’s easy, sometimes, to say the people in the streets would rather protest the police than care for their own communities. To say it’s a problem with Black men, Black fathers. But the easy argument is a lie. There are people like Elijah Lee Lewis in every big city in America, if we’re willing to see.

“I don't have to be a gang member to ride for my bros,” Lewis would say.

“He’ll go and march for his bros,” Parks tells me now as we stand in front of the Northwest African American Museum overlooking Jimi Hendrix Park. “He’ll go harder on his companies for his bros. He’ll pull up and organize youth open mics so that minds can expand for his bros. That’s what he was out here doing for his bros, for all of us.” 

Special report: This football coach spent years saving kids from gun violence. Then someone shot him

We ride north, passing Garfield High School – where musicians Quincy Jones, Hendrix and Macklemore walked the halls – and the historic Garfield park, where Negro League Baseball players once graced the fields. Lewis flowed between these worlds, south to north, despite the notion that neighborhoods didn’t always play well together. They danced differently. They talked differently. 

Throughout my days in Seattle, though, the people who knew Lewis will tell me how he always spoke up. He was no pushover. At the same time, he was a friend. The most loyal friend Parks ever had, he tells me. 

“He helped me bury my mom,” Parks says as we drive. She died in 2021. Breast cancer. Lewis helped him set up the funeral. 

“I didn’t used to call him ‘brother’ at first,” Parks says. “He used to call me brother so much, though. You’ve got to do a lot to be my brother, you know? But you didn’t have to do a lot to be his brother.” 

Lewis had a lot of brothers and lost a lot of them. On another day, I’ll watch a video of him talking about it.

“We’ve gone through a lot in the last five years,” he said in 2022, 364 days before he was killed.

“I’ve lost over 40 people and a lot of them due to gun violence,” he said. “People ask me why I'm in this work, and for me it’s not work. … I love doing this for my community because what I'm doing actually saves lives.” 

On the corner of 24th Avenue and East Union Street, a bright orange mural covers one side of a six-story building. A purple dancing woman. A purple man playing the saxophone. Another purple person with a raised fist that meets red, black and green swirls, the colors of Africa. Geometric shapes resembling a kente form a lengthy border on one side.

Parks brings me here, in the heart of the Central District, to see not just this building’s beauty but its meaning. It means a lot in a city that’s less than 7% Black.

It’s called the Liberty Bank Building. It sits on the site where the Pacific Northwest’s first Black-owned bank once stood.

Look at a map from the 1960 Census and you’ll see that almost every Black person in Seattle could be found in a single tight triangular cluster of neighborhoods in the middle of town. The Central District. The Black population anywhere else in the region was practically zero. 

Remember that in America, the South had no exclusive claim to segregation. There’s a map like this for lots of American cities, this abomination of red lines. The laws and the lenders steered Black families into certain neighborhoods and steered all the money and improvements somewhere else. 

Liberty Bank was founded in 1968 to give the Central District everything the neighborhood and its people had been denied. 

Fifty years later, the city didn’t look the same. But the Central District didn’t look the same either. The places America used to call urban were filling up with new buildings, new money, new faces. The people who built the communities were being pushed out by another kind of economic discrimination. 

So community groups in Seattle built this tower on the site of the old bank for the same reasons. The top floors would be apartments, 115 of them, constructed specifically for the people who couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood of their families’ roots. The bottom floors would be commercial spaces where Black-owned businesses could prosper. The whole thing became a symbol of the Central District – here, they call it the CD – and of people reclaiming their home. 

The new Liberty Bank Building opened in 2019. Everyone should have come together. Then the pandemic arrived, and everyone was pulled apart. 

But they had a community activism group called Africatown. And Africatown had an organizer named Elijah. 

Every week he organized community meetings in the building, connecting residents needing groceries and businesses hurting for customers. He set up wellness checks for those ailing physically or mentally. When Thanksgiving arrived, Lewis stayed up all night cooking for the building.

“He was just the perfect person for the job,” Parks says of Lewis. 

Parks shows me how the neighborhood is flourishing now. A coffee shop. A bakery. A longstanding barbershop. An award-winning soul food restaurant. An art gallery. A brewery.

The CD isn’t just part of Lewis' Seattle. It’s part of Parks', too.

Parks was once a gang-banger from the Central District. He has been out of the game since he was 24. His priorities are different now.

“I’m still from where I’m from – I just don’t bang,” Parks tells me. “I’m not actively destroying my community. But really, gangs were here to protect our communities. … I’m territorial about my people.” 

His path to redemption became dead Black men. He grew tired of watching the “very public executions of our people being broadcast across the world" – Mike Brown, Freddie Gray. He grew tired of seeing men in the neighborhood – men who looked like him – die, too. 

Even his family members doubted his new life. But he read. Explored his African roots. Realized his role as a Black man could mean vibrancy instead of violence. Got involved with a grassroots mentorship group, started visiting high schools to guide younger kids. And he met a student in a suit and tie, all confident with a smile.

In many ways, the student became the teacher. Lewis showed Parks how to build connections. “They have really been trying to wipe us out of here,” Parks says before we head out of the CD. “Elijah was locked in to making sure this historically Black neighborhood thrived again.”

There’s one more neighborhood we have to see. 

I feel awful asking him to come here with me, to the place where his best friend was killed, but here we are, at the corner of East Pine and Broadway. Traffic, horns, people rushing around us, the clunk of tires over the streetcar tracks. 

Down here between the buildings, the shadows are growing long. Up above us the sky is light. A ray of sun cuts down the block and reflects in his sad eyes.

Parks knows his own past. He could have been the one to die too soon. He says he put his life on the line to protect Lewis, particularly during some of the more volatile Floyd protests. But he wasn’t with him on one peaceful spring afternoon, when one man on this street happened to have a gun.

“He hugged me,” Parks says, “30 minutes before he was murdered.” 

That afternoon, April 1, Lewis said goodbye to his brother. He needed to go see his nephew.

Lewis was downright giddy about taking the 9-year-old to the Monster Jam monster truck show. It was a day-late birthday present for the boy, but it was a treat for the big kid, as well. 

About 5:15 p.m., Lewis pulled up in front of his sister’s Capitol Hill apartment. He called from the car. 

It was still cool, then, with temps in the 40s, and damp. Qing would have been wrapped up in his hooded sweatshirt. The boy came downstairs and climbed into the passenger’s seat. 

It must have been a familiar feeling for both of them. They spent so much time together. 

Sometimes it seemed like since his niece and nephew were able to walk, Lewis always had them in tow. If you saw Lewis, you usually saw Qing, 9, and Qody, 11. (Pronounced “King” and “Cody." Remember, their mom is Quincy.) 

Lewis called them his king and queen. 

Lewis and friend Teme Wokoma founded the Sankofa Theater in 2021. They won grant money and would open a black-box theater and meeting space inside a city arts building. It would be the hub for an artistic development organization Lewis founded, Ethereal Vision. 

When Lewis and Wokoma got the keys to the theater, it was time to go to work. Lewis showed up with his muscle – his king and queen. They helped clean and decorate the theater.

“His nephew and niece were always with him,” Wokoma tells me. “He always said, ‘I’m teaching them to be community builders.’” 

They attended rallies, fundraisers and food drives with him. They helped him set up the marketplace and last year’s Juneteenth celebration. They passed out back-to-school supplies. 

When they weren’t making connections, they were doing business. “He wanted to be the fun uncle,” sister Quincy will tell me later, “but he was turning them into entrepreneurs. He made them have lemonade stands.” 

And when all this work kept them out too late and Lewis was too tired to drive them home, they went to his apartment to spend the night. For two working parents of two small children, a loving uncle to care for the children was a blessing. At the same time, Quincy would sometimes have to laugh and call her brother: “Please bring my children home. I miss them.” 

Wokoma said her friend was intentional. “They need to learn young,” Elijah would say. “All this needs to be instilled now. There’s going to be a point in time when I’m not here.”

With Qing in the passenger’s seat, Lewis steered the red Camry back into traffic, eastbound toward Broadway. The truck show was at the stadium, Lumen Field. It’s barely two miles away. The pair would have driven up the block, turned down Broadway and been gone. 

As for the next thing that happened, it’s not clear whose fault it was, if it was anybody’s fault at all. In those first moments, according to the official reports, there’s no indication anyone even got hurt. 

As Lewis pulled into traffic, he crossed paths with a man on an electric scooter. The kind of scooter that’s stacked up on street corners in big cities and college campuses everywhere.

One witness thought the car might have clipped the scooter, but he wasn’t sure. Soon, the man on the scooter and the man behind the wheel were shouting.

“Watch where you’re going!” one person heard the man on the scooter say. Another heard him “cussing” at the driver. Another heard, “What the hell?” 

A witness saw Lewis lean out of the car window. According to police interviews, he swore at the man in return. 

According to police documents, surveillance video shows the scooter pull in front of the car and stop. Then the rider raises his right leg and attempts to kick the passenger side. 

The side where Qing, Lewis’s nephew, was riding. 

Lewis kept pulling forward, making the right onto Broadway, driving away. The man was off his scooter now, on foot, walking toward the car as it drove. One of the witnesses across the street saw his right arm outstretched. 

The witnesses told police it was clear the car had already passed him when they heard the shots begin.

This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill road rage incident, though those have become problematic, to say the least, in this country. More than 550 people were shot in road rage confrontations in the U.S. in 2022, according to a recent report from the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. 

Let me break that down for you. That means, on average, an American is fatally shot or injured every 16 hours during a road rage episode. If, while you are on your way home from work tomorrow night, there is a road-rage shooting somewhere in America, chances are good there will be another one by the time you’re on your way back to work the next day.

This wasn’t some highway altercation when one driver cuts off another vehicle. This wasn’t some tailgating, some brake-checking foolishness. It didn’t happen in a construction zone or a race to cut in line where two lanes merge. 

This was a man on an electric scooter, rolling down a crowded Seattle street in the early evening, strapped with a gun. 

One might be compelled to inquire why. I’ve tried to ask his defense attorneys that question, of course. I’ve tried to ask them to help unravel what occurred that day. 

The man’s name, by the way, is Patrick F. Cooney. He is 35. He worked as a digital marketer before April 1. Now he sits in the King County Correctional Facility in lieu of $2 million bail, charged with second-degree murder and first-degree assault. His next pre-trial hearing is scheduled for Aug. 23.

His attorneys declined to comment in response to my request for an interview. My message to him, using a paid inmate messaging system, drew no reply.

So there are other things we cannot know: Whether the fact that he is white and Lewis was Black has any bearing on this case. What he was thinking in the moment the car drove away from him.  

King County prosecutors, in their case summary and bail request, didn’t mince words on how they view this case:

“In broad daylight at a crowded intersection on Capitol Hill, the defendant turned what should have been a minor, inconsequential traffic misunderstanding into a deadly shooting.” 

“Multiple bystanders and passing motorists were also endangered by the defendant’s decision to pull his gun and fire five shots at a car that was already moving past and away from him by the time he opened fire,” they went on. “Despite his lack of known criminal convictions, his decisions and actions establish clearly that he is a threat to community safety.”

Lewis steered the Camry for about two more blocks. The car eventually crashed into parked vehicles along Pike Street and Harvard Avenue. His body was found draped over his nephew. The last time Qing saw Elijah, he was still breathing. 

From her apartment window, Quincy heard the shots. She watched as officers roped off the area, put down markers to note the empty casings. She just didn’t know her brother and son were involved. Then she got her own phone call.

At the hospital, she found Qing alive, playing with a tablet someone had given him as a distraction. She assumed Elijah would join them. Instead, a doctor asked her to step into another room.  He told her they did everything they could to restart Elijah’s heart. He had lost too much blood. 

“They couldn’t get his heart back, and he died,” she will tell me. “So I was alone, in a room screaming to a stranger that they’re lying.”  

He was 23 years old.

The police report concluded that at least five shots were fired. Three hit the car.

One went through the passenger’s side door and hit the 9-year-old boy in the right calf. 

One went through Elijah Lewis’ chest.

The third bullet was found by crime scene investigators. 

The 9-year-old boy had been wearing a hooded sweatshirt. After it was removed, investigators examined it. “The bullet, due to the heat it generates, was fused to the lining of the hood,” police said. 

Fused to the hood of the sweatshirt, next to the head of a 9-year-old boy. The thought makes me sick to my stomach.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar.

A Black man grows up in the Central District. Goes to Rainier Beach High. Ends up founding a small business, mentoring kids in the neighborhood. Then one day, seemingly for no reason at all, somebody shoots and kills him. 

I’m talking about a man named D’Vonne Pickett Jr., who ran a package and mailing store named after his grandfather, who delivered mail in the neighborhood for 40 years. 

You’ve heard this story because this is the story we hear over and over about people in America, where we live with the highest rates of gun violence of any wealthy country in the world. 

When Pickett was killed – in October of last year – Elijah Lewis and his friends were devastated. 

We were like, ‘Man, here we go again. This is ridiculous,’” TraeAnna Holiday tells me when I talk to her. 

Pickett, 31, was “doing everything right,” she says. “He was a husband, a father, a business owner. He was a pillar in our community. He had left the city, got his degrees, got his expertise, brought it back, and was just such a huge example of how you’re supposed to do it. And yet his life was taken by gun violence.”

The friends had noticed something else, too. In 2020, the George Floyd protests had galvanized the city. But to their eyes, the movement wasn’t being driven by Black people. 

“So Elijah pulled together a bunch of us,” Holiday says, “and said, ‘Let’s do something.’”

As he often did, Elijah seemed to know exactly what. Much of it was already written down. They called it the Covenant. 

The Covenant is about love, empathy, support, mutual growth, community and connection – the creed Lewis and his crew lived by. Think of it as an oath for living. The covenant is a full document, something more like a declaration. Its 17 principles are a declaration of dependence, of power. Here are a few:

We are rooted in the best of our wisdom & traditions.

We work together to protect our community.

We understand that internal peace is our natural response to all challenges.

We avoid doing ourselves harm by avoiding doing harm to others.

Lewis and friends had been talking about it for years, since 2020. They wrote most of it down in 2021 and took it far and wide in 2022 after Pickett died. Today, they call it a movement “focused on ending gun violence and supporting well-being in Black communities.” Lewis and other community organizers had started traveling to schools in Seattle and Tacoma spreading the principles to impressionable students. 

Today, the group has toured 10 schools to pitch the Covenant. Hundreds more in the community have been presented with the idea. More than 200 people have signed on to its principles. 

“I compare Elijah with the greats,” his sister Quincy will tell me later. “To know Malcolm X’s work was to know him; to know Martin Luther King Jr.’s work was to know him. To know their work and how they showed up daily is to know them. Elijah was genuinely that person. To know my brother’s work was to know him.”

Come to Seattle looking for Elijah Lee Lewis and you’ll find him. The oath is written down, all 17 points of it. You’ll also find something more. 

There’s an eerie stateliness to this mammoth Mediterranean Revival building – with its beige brick facade – that spreads across two city blocks. For decades it served as Seattle’s immigration and detention center, first housing Chinese detainees and then Japanese prisoners during World War II. 

Once inside, though, the arched front entryways resemble gold bars. Sunlight streams in from the windows onto the dark hallway floors, offering a reprieve from the ghosts of horrible history. It’s now called the Inscape Arts Building, and it houses hundreds of artist workspaces and apartments. It’s here that Lewis helped open the Sankofa Theater.

I envision him running into this 76,600-square-foot building, king and queen in tow – relishing the way it once symbolized exclusion, but is now a bastion for all.

Beyond his spirit, what’s left of him here is his photo on the bar as you enter their first-floor meeting space and something special tucked behind a coat rack. There sits a gold A-framed chalkboard sign. It’s hidden because no one wants to disturb the curlicue writing.

WELCOME TO OUR “Youth Centered Open Mic”! My Momma’s Spaghetti Cooking & Fruit Salad $10.00 Plates!

Lewis penned the message in late February, after months of planning the event. Poets, comedians, rappers, singers, writers and other artists gathered to share their talents. His mother catered. 

I’m here to talk to Wokoma, the theater’s cofounder. She tells me she worries about Qing, especially. 

“I’m devastated – I’m devastated that happened to him,” Wokoma sobs in her hands, barely able to get the words out. She’s crushed by grief for the boy and for her brother-friend. “I don’t know why. He didn’t deserve that. They didn’t deserve that.

“Imagine being him: the last time you remember stepping outside, you almost lost your life,” she said of Qing. “And your uncle died protecting you. That's traumatizing. That’s just awful.”

I've got a niece and nephew right now. … There’s going to be a point in time when I’m not here.

The day after Lewis died, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell released a statement lamenting the “sudden and cruel loss.”

“Losing leaders like Elijah isn’t just hurtful and exhausting for their families and our neighbors, it represents a real step back for our communities,” he said. 

Three weeks later, the state Senate – the same one that was once home to Cal Anderson – adopted a resolution about Lewis. It called him “a significant community leader” who dedicated his life to “empowering those around him, creating spaces for peace, growth, and justice.”

That same day of the Lewis resolution, after months of bruising public hearings and floor debate, the two houses of the legislature delivered a bill to the governor’s desk. Four days later, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee would sign it into law, with an emergency clause that would make it take effect immediately. 

HB 1240 was a history-making ban on assault rifles, the weapons so often used in mass shootings in the United States. 

The timing feels remarkable, that Washington would become the 10th American state with such a ban, just weeks after Lewis’ crushing place in history was etched. Even if the law wouldn’t have had much effect on the handgun that was used to kill him. Even if Lewis’ work didn’t have much to do with its passage.

Or did it? 

The Senate decree about Lewis includes this line: 

“Elijah's love of community drove him to stand up tall where adults failed and in 2018, as a senior in high school, he spoke in front of thousands of people at the Seattle March for Our Lives protest to call for change in light of government inaction towards gun violence.”

Just before the vote, state Sen. Rebecca Saldana delivered her remarks in favor of the resolution.

“This does not have to be the way that our children are raised,” she said. “We do not have to lose lives this way.”

“I know that this body is wrestling with these issues,” she said.  “But we are hopeful that when they become law, they are small steps toward changing this culture that is eating us up alive.” 

After the vote, the Senate president directed everyone to look toward the gallery. Jenine Lewis was there. They gave her a round of applause. 

Before you make any decisions on guns, think about your children. 

Two days after the vote, 22 days after Lewis died, people gathered at the Rainier Arts and Cultural Center. One of them was Qing, his nephew, who turned 9 one day before he was shot. 

Qing is not ready to talk to me about the day he was supposed to go to a monster truck rally, for his birthday, with his uncle. 

These days, Qing doesn’t like for anyone to leave the apartment. He used to be happy to take his allowance money to the corner store. He won’t go alone anymore. “Where are you going?” he’ll ask when family members leave. If he ventures outside, he will inevitably relive the nightmare at his front door. “Don't go out the front,” he’ll say, “go out the back.”

He may not yet quite understand what has been lost – beyond what any traumatized 9-year-old can process about the death of a family member. 

He has only spoken publicly about his uncle one time, that day at the cultural center in April. 

Though hundreds of people had packed themselves into the auditorium for the public viewing, there is no known video of what happened, no transcript in the public record. No reporters or TV cameras were allowed. The family asked that no one record it on their phones. 

But the people who were there know what they heard. They know what they saw.

Come to Seattle to look for Elijah Lee Lewis, and you’ll find him in a dozen different places. His hand was in everything. He was everywhere. His efforts will not be forgotten. 

But there was one person he held desperately close, even as he died. Ask his friends and family, where is that seed of leadership, generosity, community and humanity living now? And they will tell you. 

Qing.

“The fact that he was just brave enough to get up there – without any coaching, without any pressure – I think he made the decision before his mom and dad and I recognized what he was doing,” Reca Washington, who had once been Elijah’s Sunday school teacher, told me. “What I remember is a young Elijah when I saw him up there. It was the fire in him. When he spoke, it was just another embodiment of Elijah.”

Still recovering from the gunshot wound, the boy needed assistance climbing the stairs. 

He hobbled to the center of the stage, alone, looked out, and took the microphone. 

“If you are my uncle’s friend or family say ‘Woot, woot.’”

The crowd responded: “Woot, woot!”

“Do you love my Uncle Elijah?” Qing asked.

“Yeah!” the crowd shouted.

He held the microphone and looked out again. He was not alone. He was surrounded by a city full of brothers. Brothers and sisters.

“I look around and it touches my heart that if you were considered his friend, you were considered his family,” he said. “Thank you for loving my uncle.”

Suzette Hackney is a national columnist. Reach her on Twitter: @suzyscribe.