• Ananda La Vita

From the upcoming Stranger:

Maurice Clemmons would have been the first to say that a man needs to be held accountable for his actions.

"There is absolutely no excuse/justification for my past criminal behavior," he wrote 10 years ago in a clemency application to then-Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, pleading for "mercy" regarding the 108-year sentence he was serving at the time for two robberies and other crimes he'd committed when he was 16.

This was back when Clemmons was purportedly a God-fearing man. Back before he allegedly came to believe, sometime this summer, that he himself was God—Jesus Christ, to be exact, with an ability to fly. ("He reportedly thinks he can fly away and at one point was found in the backyard jumping," says a Pierce County police report from July.) It was back before authorities suspected Clemmons of shooting four Lakewood police officers at a coffee shop on November 29, execution-style, in the worst police killing in Washington State history. Before Clemmons was the subject of a sprawling, chaotic, nearly two-day-long manhunt that consumed SWAT teams and patrol officers all over Seattle and the surrounding region. Before several of Clemmons's family members and friends were rounded up and accused of helping him elude authorities. Before the manhunt finally ended, in the early morning hours of December 1, with Clemmons being shot dead by a lone Seattle officer on patrol in Rainier Valley.

With the hunt for Clemmons now over, a huge question—as important to the local criminal-justice and mental-health systems as it is to the political future of Huckabee—has taken center stage: Who is responsible for the destruction he wreaked this year?

Naturally, everyone involved is pointing in a different direction. Read about who's pointing where, and comment on where you think blame should actually fall in this case, HERE.