BLAME CANADA (AND HIS DAD)
  • BLAME CANADA (AND HIS DAD)

Hello and welcome to a very special edition of Last Days: The Week in Review, created for our annual Regrets issue, in which we revisit seven regrettable days from a regrettable year. Let's start at the very beginning ("A very good place to start" —M. Von Trapp, Nazi punker), with the first few minutes of 2014, when a Seattle man with a history of alcohol abuse and antipathy against gays poured gasoline all over the carpeted stairway of Neighbours gay nightclub and lit it on fire. "The bar in the 1500 block of Broadway was occupied by more than 750 patrons celebrating New Year's Eve at the time," reported the SPD Blotter at the time. "The fire was quickly discovered before it could spread beyond the stairway and was extinguished with a fire extinguisher... An orderly evacuation was accomplished and no one was injured." Still, things could've gone much, much worse—a fact eloquently addressed at the time by US Army Staff Sergeant Christopher Bostick, a Neighbours attendee whose quick response to the flames likely saved many lives. "You know, in 30 seconds, if that fire did what the arsonist intended, there's no telling how many people could have died," Bostick told KIRO in early January. "This was a planned attack on a large quantity of people in order to affect an entire community. To me, that's terrorism."…

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