A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

optometrist’s office and if the sun was bothering him. He sat silently, staring at the bus driver.
    Francisco Carrasco, thirty-one, had been visiting with friends in the north end of the city, and he paid his fare at 80th and Aurora. “I sat on the second seat behind the back stairs in the ‘trailer’ part of the bus on the driver’s side.”
    Jeremy Hauglee was nineteen, and he headed as he usually did toward the rear of the bus, sat down and immediately put on his earphones. Soon he was lost in his own world.
    Judy Laubach, forty, worked in the financial division at the downtown flagship Nordstrom’s store. She had a flexible work schedule that allowed her to go in as early as nine A.M . or as late as noon, depending on her workload. It was very rare for her to head downtown so late, but on this afternoon she had debated going in at all. Finally, knowing she had some work to catch up on, she left home shortly before three, catching Number 359 near the Presbyterian church at Green Lake. She sat on the right side just behind the handicapped section—in the first seats that faced forward. Deep in thought, Judy was only peripherally aware of the man who got on the bus a few stops before the Aurora Bridge.
    Herman Liebelt, sixty-nine, caught the bus, as always, near Green Lake. He had finished his weekly three-mile walk around the scenic city lake, had gone to visit an old friend, and was headed to the Urban Bakery for a cup of coffee before heading home to a senior citizens housing building downtown. Liebelt was alone in the world except for some stepchildren in California, but he wasn’t a lonely man at all; he believed in getting out of his apartment and talking to people. When the weather was good, he loved to sit on a bench at Green Lake and discuss life and the world with strangers who paused to chat. He never lacked for someone to talk to; people seemed to be naturally drawn to him.
    P. K. Koo was seventy-six, and spoke virtually no English. He took his seat three back from the front on the opposite side from Mark McLaughlin. He watched what was going on around him, and saw a number of people get on at various bus stops. Idly, he noted the tall white man who got on three or four stops before the big bridge.
    Aurora Avenue North used to be one of the major thoroughfares in Seattle, but with the advent of the Interstate 5 freeway, it is now only a surprisingly narrow street lined mostly with businesses that saw their good years in the fifties and sixties. Passing decades-old landmarks like the trumpeting elephant sign and the Twin Tee Pees, the number 359 runs through neighborhoods, past motels and restaurants, the Washelli cemetery, the sweeping park with a walking track that surrounds Green Lake, and past the zoo at Woodland Park before it heads into downtown.
    At Woodland Park, Mark McLaughlin detoured off Aurora to pause at bus stops along Stone Way North. And then at North 38th, he wrenched the wheel hard and headed up onto the southbound ramp that led back onto Aurora over the long bridge that crosses the Lake Washington Ship Canal. At its highest point, the Aurora Bridge arches 175 feet above the water.
    It was a few minutes after three P.M.
    Shortly after the long bus lumbered up the ramp, something happened, something that seemed almost surreal to those passengers who were alert to what was going on around them. They watched it happen almost without comprehension, the way the eye fixes on a magnified blow-up of some everyday item which, enlarged,
looks
foreign. It takes a few moments to recognize what one is actually seeing. The passengers could not compute what
they
were seeing.
    There wasn’t even time for panic or for anyone to stop what they watched. And, like many eyewitnesses, later they could not agree on the precise details of what they saw. The
only
thing they would be in consensus about was that a man got up, and walked silently up to the bus driver. Before they could wonder why he was getting up, since there was no stop on the bridge, many passengers heard a series of loud noises—“pops,” “bangs,” “fire-crackers.”
    Some who were familiar with guns knew they were hearing gunfire; some were puzzled. And, then, within a matter of seconds, the 20-ton bus began to veer left.
    Later, some of the thirty-three passengers on that bus would try to make some sense out of what had happened to them.
    “Moments after I got on,” Judy Laubach recalled, “I remember a gentleman getting