Jim Camden: My favorite stories of 2016
As a political reporter and the newspaper’s Olympia bureau chief, most of my time in the very political year was spent covering the elections and an extended legislative session. The elections came to a close on Nov. 8, and the special section The Spokesman-Review had the next morning is one of the best I’ve been involved in more than 40 years of covering elections.
But the session and the campaign stories tend to blur together, so it’s probably easier for me to remember other stories:
Legislator, reporter engaged in fist fight on the House floor
Sometimes, a reporter practically trips over a good story. That’s what happened with the first big story I wrote in 2016, involving a fight between a reporter and a state legislator back in 1909. I stumbled across it while researching another story.
Legislators were calling for Auditor Troy Kelley to be impeached, and the last time a state official was impeached was 1909. Turns out that was a particularly contentious session that got so bad, the History of the Washington Legislature said, that there were two fist fights on the floor of the House “between Rep. MacArthur of Spokane and one Smith a reporter for The Spokesman-Review.”
Having never been in a fist fight with a legislator, I was intrigued. It took a bit of digging to discover the reporter was Joe Smith, who had a fairly colorful history as a journalist and politician, and is famous enough to have several boxes of papers in the University of Washington archives.
The legislator was Rep. James W. McArthur, a druggist who’d been elected in 1908. The issue was Prohibition, although news accounts varied over how the fight started, and whether there were two, or a long one with an brief interlude between blows. What is on the record is Smith’s formal apology to the chamber in the next day’s House Journal.
It made for an interesting feature just before the 2016 session opened and allowed one small bit of satisfaction. For all my years of covering politics, I have never punched a legislator.
After the story ran I got a call from longtime colleague Tom McArthur who said thanks for writing about his grandfather, and mentioned the drug store was on the corner of Sprague and Monroe, across from the entrance to the Spokane Chronicle, where the Fox Theater now stands.
Software Plagues Community Colleges
This story was built on public records requests after a tip that Community Colleges of Spokane were having trouble registering students, tracking their financial aid and paying instructors. The culprit was, and still is, a new computer software program purchased to replace a 30-year-old system. The new system, ctcLink, will eventually go into all 34 community colleges across Washington.
Spokane and Tacoma colleges volunteered to be guinea pigs, and the story might be a good lesson for what everyone learns in the military: Never volunteer. The $100 million program is more than $10 million over budget, and more than three years behind schedule. After wading through thousands of emails and other documents, we tried to explain what happened.
Some of the problems still aren’t fixed.
Dueling protests over transgender bathroom rule
When legislators are in Olympia, it’s a rare week that goes by without a protest over some issue. This year one of the flash points was a rule that allows transgender people to use the public restroom or other facility based on their gender identity.
Supporters and opponents packed hearing rooms as lawmakers held hearings on proposals to require people to use facilities based on their genitalia. In mid-February, opponents and supporters of the rule held dueling demonstrations, with one side occupying the Capitol’s north steps and the other the steps to the Temple of Justice and only the grassy island with three large flag poles separating them.
There were plenty of eye-catching signs and colorful chants, including the one the supporters of the rule kept shouting: “We’re not here to dupe. We’re just here to poop.”
Sometimes a good story just drops in your lap, like when a person emailed to suggest we write about his grandfather Hal Morrill, who was helping the Forest Service figure out how the wreckage of a fighter plane wound up on a mountainside in the Colville National Forest.
Morrill knew because as a young lieutenant, he was the wingman for Maj. Charles Seeley, whose Air National Guard F-86A Saberjet went down there in 1955.
Folks had pretty much forgotten that crash, and the forest had grown up around what was left of the plane. A Forest Service crew stumbled across the wreckage, and with the help of the Fairchild Air Force Base historian, the service pieced together the details of the crash. They also tracked down Morrill, who was mentioned in The Spokesman-Review the day after the crash. Retired now, he still lives in northeast Spokane.
He later wrote to say he was pleasantly surprised to find a photo of himself on the front page the day the story ran.
In June, active duty and National Guard members, along with emergency responders, medical crews and government officials had a dry run for what they would do if a massive quake along a line known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone were to happen. Technically, they were practicing for when it will happen, because eventually, it will.
In a nutshell, they’ll provide assistance and supplies by air, sea and just about any military vehicle they can find that can navigate the damaged roads and bridges. For three days I got to watch them do everything from bring equipment ashore on landing craft to drop rescuers and supplies by parachute from helicopters.
As a bonus, I got to fly over the Puget Sound two days in a row in the back of a Blackhawk, which is much more fun than sitting in a hearing room for a legislative committee. And only slightly noisier.
The newspaper got a tip that there was more to a particularly violent murder near Ritzville than the grim details reported when Manuel Argomaniz Camargo was found walking along the shoulder of Interstate 90, his 3-year-old son in his arms and his girlfriend lying dead about a mile away.
Although Camargo was described in initial police reports as a Chicago resident, a deep dive into state and federal records showed he and his late girlfriend Ana Garcia had ties to Central Washington. Both were natives of Mexico; she was in the country legally, but he was not.
He had encountered law enforcement officials twice before the murder but was never deported. Arrested, jailed briefly and convicted in Grant County for driving under the influence, there’s no record that state or local law enforcement officials ever checked his immigration status. After several tries over two months, we also got documents from the Border Patrol through the Freedom of Information Act that showed Camargo was stopped while traveling by bus through Spokane with Garcia and their infant son Hector. Detained by agents, he was later released for “humanitarian reasons” by a supervisor. An immigration judge in Chicago later allowed him to stay in the country, reportedly as an effort to keep their family together.
While those sounded like charitable acts, they had fatal consequences.
Two years later that family was breaking up, and Camargo was driving Garcia and Hector back to her mother’s home in Moses Lake. He was also dipping into a pound of meth he was planning to sell to stay awake on the long drive. Convinced that Garcia was a witch who was making the car break down, he killed her in a drug-fueled rage. With the help of Staff Writer Rachel Alexander, who speaks Spanish, we got the story of Manuel and Ana from her mother Nicolasa Garcia, from the time they met at a local dance to that fateful night along the side of I-90. Had local, state or federal officials deported Camargo, Ana still would be alive, Nicolasa said.
Carmargo pleaded guilty to murder, later tried to change his plea but had that request denied. He’s scheduled for sentencing in January. Hector lives with Nicolasa and one of Ana’s sisters.