The father of a 19-year-old killed in Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) spoke in a lengthy, emotional interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday evening.
Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr. died the morning of June 21 during a shooting on the outskirts of CHAZ, which was later renamed “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” (CHOP). The young man’s death is not the only one that occurred inside the now-defunct “no-cop zone.”
His father Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr. pleaded for answers and told Hannity that no one in charge has spoken to him about his son’s murder. Anderson continued on to note that “these are kids” inside the zone and criticized local officials for failing to stop it earlier.
“I gotta bury my son tomorrow,” Anderson said at one point during the interview. “It’s just been a lot going on. … To this day, it’s been almost two weeks, I haven’t heard from nobody. Hasn’t nobody called. Ain’t nobody called me or tried to find me. … His number is my number, so it’s easy … for the detectives to say, excuse me, knock on my door, ‘Let me tell you what happened about your son.’ I don’t know nothing. I had to find my son. They wouldn’t even let me see my son. It took me a whole week before I could see my son.”
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“It’s getting to the point, you know, where, you know, it’s getting …” Anderson said before breaking down into tears. Community activist and Not This Time founder Andre Taylor wrapped his arm around him. “I’m just really…. Man.”
Hannity said that what Anderson has been through would “break” him, too. Anderson repeated how no one, including police and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, has told him anything about his son’s death.
“Somebody need to answer for this,” Anderson said through tears. “And they need to come talk to me and somebody need to come tell me something, ’cause I still don’t know nothing and somebody need to come to my house and knock on my door and tell me something. You know? I don’t know nothing. All I know is that my son, he got killed up there and he’s just a 19-year-old. No, that’s Horace Lorenzo Anderson. That’s my son. You know? And I loved him. And that was my son.”
Anderson said he was told by two of his son’s friends who happened to be in the area about the murder. He told Hannity that he will be burying his son Thursday and that he is still “numb,” Fox News reported.
“All I know is my son is dead,” Anderson said. “I’m still trying to figure out answers so I can sleep. I don’t sleep. My kids don’t sleep. I can’t even stay at home. My kids, they feel like they are unsafe at home. I’ve been buying motel rooms and I don’t have that type of money. I wasn’t prepared for this.”
Anderson said he doesn’t feel as though law enforcement helped his son and explained how he still wakes up every morning looking for him, Fox News reported. (RELATED: ‘Enough Is Enough’: Seattle Police Chief Rips CHAZ, Gets Heckled At Press Conference)
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“I wake up in the morning … I look for my son in the morning. He’s not there no more. You know I’m saying? It’s like I go in there, I’m kissing a picture. He’s not there,” Anderson said, adding that while he supports the Black Lives Matter movement, his current movement is to let people know it was his son that died.
“You’re taking away generations,” Anderson added. “You’re taking away our youth. You are taking away. My son never had a chance to have another child. My grandbaby would never be … that’s a generation taken from me.”
The father said during the roughly 30-minute interview that despite it all, he still feels that God will “take care of it” and will “take care of” his son. He also touched upon his relationship with his children and said that he only knew how to teach them to live.
“You know, kids, they do what they do,” Anderson said. “My thing in life was, all I can do is teach you how to live. I couldn’t teach him how to die because I ain’t never died before, so, I don’t know how to teach my kids how to die. I teach them how to live.”
