Seattle Crime Reports : Seattle Crime Blog : Seattle, Washington

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The horrendous beating death of Noel Richard Lopez by two men at a Capitol Hill construction (which the Seattle Crime Blogger covered on Tuesday) site got me to thinking about the death penalty in Washington State, due to the horrible nature of the crime. 

The two men suspected in Lopez's murder probably won't be getting it, as Washington State only has the option of execution if offenders are convicted of aggravated first-degree murder, which these two men are not eligible to be tried under. Check out this rundown of the 13 different situations where someone can be tried for that crime.

My original post was going to be a debate on whether or not they deserved the death penalty (and whether the death penalty is a viable means of punishment due to states justice systems inherent flaws) if found guilty of beating a man with various objects over the course of several hours...but as it turns out, it doesn't matter if they deserve it, because they are not eligible.

Yet through the course of the research, I found an interesting tidbit on the State legislature's website.

Four prisoners have been executed in Washington State since 1976 (the year the Supreme Court's ban on capital punishment was overturned). And while that information may be of little interest to most readers, what stood out to me was the fact that prisoners that are to be executed can choose death by hanging if they so desire. 

Hanging?! 118 years after the first electric chair execution, our state still has an option for death row prisoners to die via the very practice the chair was created to eliminate. Unbelievable. I have to wonder what kind of public outcry we could expect should a prisoner decide to serve out his sentence at the end of a rope. Whether that situation will arise in the foreseeable future is anyone's guess.

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Yup...captured this morning:

The 20-year-old Seattle man was arrested by police at noon in downtown Seattle, said Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kapell. He was booked into the King County Jail on investigation of murder and for an unrelated warrant.

Everyone's accounted for. Now lets hope the real details start to emerge.

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Over the past few days, the story of Noel Richard Lopez - a 25-year-old Texas transplant to Seattle who was found beaten to death at a construction site near 7th & Madison last week - has been the subject of more in-depth coverage. Though the link between Lopez's death and the Puyallup home explosion that killed convicted sex offender Zane Dittman last Monday has since been proven false, the truth coming out regarding the Lopez case is just as sensational.

An unremarkable death that initially appeared as just a few sentences buried in the Times' Local Digest, interesting details have emerged this weekend that paint a bizarre picture of amateur fight clubs and the inner city heavyweight title for which blood has now been shed:

On Sunday, Lopez and the suspect, who is 6 feet 2 inches and weighs 220 pounds, wrestled at Freeway Park for the title of "King of Freeway Park," according to court documents.

The victim's family has said Lopez competed in entertainment wrestling.

About 20 of the suspect's friends, some of them drinking, watched as the suspect won the match, the court documents state.

The scenario sounds almost laughable: a group of more than 20 people, gathering unnoticed at a park in the middle of urban Seattle, watching a couple of dudes duke it out. But then it gets nasty.

From the sound of things, Lopez lost fair and square (or as fair as is possible in a battle with such a physically well-matched adversary). Why he didn't just depart with his tail between his legs is beyond me; it's a move that would have likely saved his life. Instead...

At some point, the suspect who was arrested and a second person, a 20-year-old man, walked with Lopez to the construction site to "handle this problem and straighten him out."

But the 22-year-old suspect told detectives that once they arrived, Lopez "came at him to fight him." That is when the two men knocked Lopez unconscious, but he regained consciousness.

The beating continued, as the men stomped on Lopez's stomach and chest, prosecutors said. They also hit and kicked him while he was on the ground and broke boards over his head and body, according to court documents.

The arrested suspect told investigators that the second man hit Lopez with a large metal object. The overall beating lasted "several hours," he said.

Even though the suspect claims Lopez was the aggressor, I'm skeptical. There are questions here that have yet to be answered:

• Why would these guys need to "straighten [Lopez] out" if the main suspect had already kicked his ass?
  
• Why did the beatings continue after Lopez was knocked out and regained consciousness, and why did the suspects use weapons when - if a beating was really all they had in mind - the job could just as easily have been done with their fists?
• Several hours? Don't know where these suspects are from, but it seems like anytime you beat someone for that long you're doing so with the impression they won't be getting up to walk it off.

I remember when I first arrived in Seattle a few years back to go to college, local kids I lived in the dorms with warned me to avoid Freeway Park after dark..."every year a few people go missing in there and just turn up dead," somebody told me. Of course, within a year I was living right next to Freeway Park and walking through it on an almost nightly basis, never encountering anything more than peace-seeking junkies and posses of roaming homeless. But I never did get to meet urban royalty.

Sometimes, being king isn't all it's cracked up to be. If only someone had told this to Noel Richard Lopez, he might still be alive today.