Horace Lorenzo Anderson’s 19-year-old son was killed in Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” zone, an autonomous space established in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and rallies.
“I’m numb; I’m still numb today,” Anderson said during an emotional interview Wednesday with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I got to bury my son tomorrow. It’s just been a lot going on.”
The space — originally known as “CHAZ,” which stood for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” — arose when police boarded up the nearby precinct after receiving thousands of complaints about how they were protecting the area and left protesters to do whatever they desired.
An executive order issued this week by the mayor, Jenny Durkan, who finally decided to step in to shut down “CHOP,” noted the six-block protest zone has seen a 525% increased in crime, including homicides, rapes, and assaults. This comes after Durkan, a Democrat, declared on CNN the protests in “CHOP” would continue for weeks and would be known as the “summer of love” in Seattle, seemingly equating the violent rioting to the 1967 hippie fest in San Francisco.
But that is not at all what has been going on in “CHOP.”
“To this day,” Anderson told Hannity, “it’s been almost two weeks, I haven’t heard from nobody.”
The grieving father said nobody in law enforcement or in the local government has tried to contact him about the death of his teenage son, who carried his name.
Anderson explained he had to go out on his own to find his son — a devastating venture that took him “a whole week.”
“I went to the hospital and they said that we couldn’t see him,” the father recalled. “They just said we couldn’t see him. When I go there, I’m going there, I’m looking for a detective, somebody tell me something. When I get there, there’s nobody. The hospital was blank. It’s silence. I’m going, ‘What’s going on?’ So I ask the lady, and she tells me, ‘Hold on.’ So I wait. I couldn’t go in. I’m waiting for a long time, and then finally, she tells me to come in and then the doctor tells me — the only thing he tells me is my son is deceased.”
At the beginning of the lengthy interview, which you can watch in full below, Anderson called out the mayor’s administration and law enforcement officers for failing to shut “CHOP” down “a long time ago.”
“I understand Black Lives Matter and everything that’s going on,” he told the Fox News host, “but that’s not my movement right now. My movement is let ’em know: that was my son. Horace Lorenzo Anderson was my son.”
“I’m not with all this whatever is going on — none of that,” Anderson added. “I don’t know nothin’ about that. All I know is this was my son, and I love him. This is incredible. That should have been gone a long time ago.”
As he got more emotional, Anderson told Hannity: “Somebody needs to answer for this.”