He drives east on Pine toward Broadway and pulls up to the curb in his red Toyota Camry. It’s an ordinary Saturday afternoon on Capitol Hill: sidewalks full, restaurants bustling, the sun getting low in the sky. The first of April, 2023. He stops for his niece Qoty to bring his nephew Qing down from their apartment above the Walgreens, and for the boy to hop in the car. 

They do this all the time. Elijah takes Qoty and Qing everywhere: community events, dinners, rallies, meetings. Qing in particular is more than just his nephew, he is Elijah’s reflection. He looks so much like his uncle that even his own mother, Elijah’s sister Quincy, mixes their names up. 

Qing turned 9 the day before; to celebrate his birthday, Elijah got them tickets to the Monster Jam at Lumen Field. This is going to be a special night. No mom and dad, no big sister. Just Qing and his uncle and the roar of the trucks and the roar of the crowd under the stadium lights. 

When Qing is buckled in, Elijah pulls back out into traffic. What happens next happens fast. A man on an electric scooter passes by the driver’s side of the car. Words are exchanged. Pedestrians stop and take notice. They keep walking. They shift to the far part of the sidewalk. 

Then suddenly the man with the scooter is standing in front of the car, blocking its path. More words. And now the man has crossed over to the passenger side of the car. The Walgreens security camera captures him kicking at the door, where Qing is sitting. It’s 5:18pm. Elijah starts to drive away. The man drops the scooter to the ground. He reaches into his pocket. As the car passes by, he raises a handgun. 

One, two, three, four, five shots. Elijah veers right onto Broadway, careening between the Mud Bay pet store and Neighbours Nightclub, then turns right again onto Pike, where the Camry finally crashes into a row of parked cars. 

Investigators would recover three bullets from the vehicle. The first passed through Qing’s leg and into the floorboard. The second passed through the rear window and into the hood of the boy’s sweatshirt, fusing with the lining of the garment before it could reach his flesh. The third was recovered from the chest of 23-year-old Elijah Lee Lewis during his autopsy. 

Elijah’s friend Ashwant Kaur remembers going with him to someone’s house a few years back. “It was snowing, and they had these plants out there that were dying,” she says.

She and I are sitting on a concrete ledge at Othello Playground. Behind us, up the hill, is the building where her friend Elijah lived in a one-bedroom apartment stuffed with books, boxes of materials from his businesses, whiteboards scrawled with lists of daily objectives, and tanks for his fish and a pet bearded dragon named Stewie. On the ceiling above his bed, he had a vision board with pictures of his heroes, words of encouragement, the numbers 206: Seattle’s area code.

Before us is the lawn where Elijah put on the Othello Marketplace, a popup event for artisans, musicians, and food vendors on weekends in the summer of 2022. He was planning to expand it in 2023—perhaps find a permanent indoor space for rainy days. Kaur and I watch a little boy chase seagulls through puddles. The wind rips across the park. 

“So on our way out, when we’re leaving, Elijah grabs three of the plants and puts them in his car.” She pauses, letting the absurdity of this act sink in. Who takes someone’s dying plants home? Who asks permission before doing it?

“And we’re driving back, and I was just like, ‘Bro, where are you going to put these plants?’ And he looks at me. ‘You’re good at taking care of plants aren’t you?’”

Kaur sighs. She smiles. She tells the rest of the story, but we both know how it ends. 

Occidental Way is quiet. There are no sporting events or monster truck rallies at the stadiums this evening. Small groups wander through security and into the Lumen Field Event Center. It’s the first of June, and Elijah’s community is gathering for what feels like the hundredth memorial for him in the two months since he was shot. 

The room fills with folding chairs and the folding chairs fill with friends, with family, with complete strangers. The vibe is heavy but celebratory. There are musical tributes. Dance routines. Eulogies from loved ones. 

In the video clips and the poems and the snippets of conversation, Elijah is alive: the goofball dancer, the kid who wore a suit and tie to class at Rainier Beach High School because he was dressing for the life he wanted, not just the one he had. The community activist delivering meals at the Liberty Bank Building in the Central District; the leader standing before a crowd with a megaphone in his hand in the summer of 2020; the entrepreneur building small businesses one handshake at a time, always introducing himself with that middle initial: Elijah L. Lewis.

Mayor Bruce Harrell usually looks unflappable. Buttoned down. Prepared. But when it’s his turn to speak, he paces the stage, reaching, pleading, talking about a Curtis Mayfield song that played earlier, unable to quite put all the circumstances of this particular tragedy into words. And what are these circumstances anyway? They are what brought the news cameras and elected officials out in addition to the friends and family; they are what brought me out, too. 

“In broad daylight at a crowded intersection on Capitol Hill, the defendant turned what should have been a minor, inconsequential traffic misunderstanding into a deadly shooting, tragically killing Elijah Lewis and wounding his 9-year-old nephew,” wrote senior deputy prosecuting attorney Terence Carlstrom days after the shooting. 

Roughly 70 people were murdered in Seattle in 2023—the highest total since the city began tracking homicides in 1979. Most of those people were killed with guns. What, if anything, makes this one different? 

There is a human urge to assign symbolic meaning to actions after they occur, even random acts of violence. Stories, after all, are how we make sense of the world. But looking for meaning in the specific moments of the shooting that killed Elijah and injured Qing would be foolish. There’s so much we will never know. And anyway, it could have been anybody. It could have not happened at all. 

“That man didn’t kill him because he was a leader,” Mario Dunham would tell me later. “That man killed him because of an argument gone wrong.”

On the other hand, Elijah spent his life fighting against gentrification, income inequality, and gun violence. Then a white tech worker shot his nephew in the leg and shot him through the back. These are the circumstances. To intentionally ignore them would be to dishonor Elijah’s life’s work. We don’t need to assign greater meaning. The facts carry more than enough. 

Before any of the speeches at his memorial, a video of Elijah flashes on the projector screen above the stage. He’s at another event, performing a ritual libation ceremony, honoring the memory of the dead. He is staring straight into the camera, as if into the future, as if, for a moment, he’s come back to talk to his mourners.  

“We all will one day become ancestors,” he says.  

Elijah Lee Lewis was born into tragedy and spent his whole life refusing to be defined by it. His mother, Jenine, who is white, and his father, Arthur Lee Lewis, met as congregants in a small Seattle church. They eloped. Arthur moved in with Jenine and her three school-aged children from previous relationships. Soon they conceived a son of their own. Jenine remembers that early on in her pregnancy, they had prayed about a boy’s name for their child. And one day she and Arthur somehow spoke out the name Elijah at the same time. 

Those days living with Arthur were hard at first, says Quincy Dunham, who is 10 years older than Elijah. Arthur was a military man: disciplined and demanding. But after a time, a family life that had been rocky and unsettled eased into something like normalcy. Then, as soon as it did, it all changed again.

On May 22, 1999, Arthur was walking down the stairs of their townhome in Skyway when his heart stopped beating. The family phone wasn’t working that day. In a speech delivered in 2020, Elijah shared that his older brother Mario ran house to house, trying to get somebody to call 911. Maybe if the ambulance had come sooner, Arthur would have survived. Jenine and the kids tried to bring him back, but were helpless as he faded away. Jenine was five months pregnant.

“We did not have any financial stability left when he passed, so we had to struggle” said Elijah in the speech. “I was born to a mother who was grieving so I also felt her pain.”

For the first 12 years of Elijah’s life, the family was deeply involved in the church, which Elijah’s older siblings Quincy and Mario have described as cult-like. It was, to them, not just a physical place, but a way of living defined by shame and fear. “Everything was a sin,” says Mario. “Pokémon was a sin. Harry Potter was a sin. Fucking Scooby Doo.” 

They moved from Skyway to Kirkland to Issaquah to Everett and back to South Seattle, changing addresses once a year or more. Quincy cared for Elijah while Jenine worked in church ministries, dishing food to the homeless, running a 12-step program, and leading Bible studies. This was the other side of it. For as hard as the church could be, it was also where Elijah and his siblings internalized the concept of service.

“It started with being on Third and Pine doing street feeding with my church growing up,” Elijah would say later in a video about his activism. “Really ultimately watching my mother and my uncles and aunties lead that life of servitude.” 

But that doesn’t mean it was easy for him, bouncing between schools, between worlds, a latchkey kid with more energy than he knew what to do with. He started lemonade stands. He ran for student office in elementary school. He loved animals. “He needed to have something constructive to do at every second, every moment of every day,” says Jenine.

Quincy remembers Elijah staying up all night playing a computer game called Zoo Tycoon, the click of the mouse keeping her awake until 4am in their small apartment until finally she broke the game in half and hid the pieces. 

Eventually, Elijah got real animals: two dogs, a rabbit, a hamster, a lizard. But the pets didn’t come with that white picket fence. When he was 12, and his siblings were all out of the house, Jenine left the church. She faced health problems. Money problems. Elijah would spend his teenage years shuttling between his mother and his sister Quincy, between various couches and homeless shelters. He would learn to stand up on his own. 

There are some photos floating around the internet of the accused shooter in the moments after the crime. He stands on the sidewalk in front of the Walgreens, wearing blue jeans, a black sweatshirt, a black backpack, and a maroon beanie. He looks like anybody. A generic Seattle tech worker. But if you squint, you can see the gun in his hands. 

His name is Patrick Francis Cooney. As of this writing, he remains in custody, awaiting trial on charges of Murder in the Second Degree and Assault in the First Degree. His bail is set at $2 million. At the time of the shooting, Cooney was 35 years old. He was, according to his LinkedIn page, employed as a marketing specialist at a biotech company. 

In the probable cause documents, a detective describes Cooney’s actions following the shooting based on the Walgreens security footage the department obtained. He does not try to run. Instead, he returns to the scooter he had dropped, “appears to rack his firearm,” picks something up from the ground, and waits for the police to arrive. He obeys commands and is taken into custody.

As Cooney waits, the Camry veers wildly away. It’s not in the official report, but Qing told his family that as the bullets tore into the car, Elijah leaned over his body to shield him. 

Qing has a sly, almost bashful way of smiling. Like he knows he’s said something funny and now he’s waiting on the grown-ups in the room to catch up to him. When I ask what he’d want people to know about Elijah, he says that he was “fun, serious, and jokey.” He takes his time to think about this. Then he tells a story that seems to perfectly encapsulate his uncle. 

A couple years back, Elijah was working with the community organization Africatown to help reopen the historic Fire Station 6 in the Central District as the William Grose Center. One day, he brought Qing and Qoty to the station to unload supplies and do some cleanup.

The building had been sitting empty for years. Not the kind of place a kid typically wants to hang out. But when the door shut behind them, Elijah pretended that they were locked in—and that his phone was still in the car. “So then we just played and organized,” says Qing. “And then when we were done, he told us that it wasn’t locked.”

Elijah would take Qing and Qoty everywhere, and it was often like this: community work and family bonding time all at once. They’d sweep up after events at the Sankofa Theater, the black box venue Elijah ran with his friend Teme Wokoma; they’d sell cocoa and cookies at street fairs. 

But sometimes it was just fun. Elijah used to take Qing up to the rooftop deck of his building, where they’d collect crickets that gathered by the Jacuzzi. They brought them down to feed to Stewie, the bearded dragon. Once, Qing remembers Elijah pulling forward in a McDonald’s drive-through, so that Qing had to order for everybody from the back seat, then pay through the rear window using his uncle’s card. 

“And then we left,” Qing says, before dropping into a perfectly pitched impersonation of Elijah. “And he says, ‘Your first day on the job.’” 

It’s springtime, 2018. Elijah, a senior now at Rainier Beach, takes the stage at a rally at Cal Anderson Park. He reads out the names of Seattleites recently lost to gun violence. 

“I ask the politicians, before you write any bills, before you take any action on guns, think about your children, think about your grandchildren, and think about their children,” he says. 

And these are not theoretical politicians either: Attorney general Bob Ferguson is there. US senator Maria Cantwell is there. Students across America are organizing after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Maybe, just maybe, people will actually listen this time. 

“Whatever you write now will affect generations to come. I’ve got a niece and nephew and I’ve got to think, if this is this crazy now, how crazy is it going to be when they turn 18? They’re 6 and 3 right now. So that’s why I’m here today.”

But then his speech takes a turn. The violence isn’t just happening in schools, Elijah says, but on the streets of South Seattle. It’s happening all around us. It’s happening every day. Committed by police. Committed by one another. It’s happening to people he knows and loves. He turns and displays his jacket to the crowd. On the back is a photo of Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens, a teenager killed by King County Sheriff’s deputies in a botched sting operation. 

“They always talk about school shootings but they never reflect on the thousands of people who have died in Chicago or Seattle or New York,” he tells the Seattle Times offstage. “They never tell our story. When a school shooting happens, and 17 people die, their lives are significant. But at the same time, why aren’t we significant?”

He is just a few blocks and five years away from the spot where he will pick up Qing for that monster truck rally.

After graduation, Elijah began to work for Africatown Community Land Trust, an organization dedicated to acquiring and preserving land for the city’s Black community, particularly in the Central District. The Africatown mission made sense to him. It represented the broad goals of financial stability and permanent physical space to a person who had been specifically denied both of those things in his own life. 

K. Wyking Garrett is CEO of Africatown, a man who pauses to fully consider each sentence before he speaks. He remembers Elijah walking through the doors as a teenage youth ambassador fully formed with the work ethic, with the curiosity, with the vision that would define his entire life. Elijah, he says, understood the impact of anti-Black policies, practices, and culture; he understood what stood in the way of his community thriving. 

Restrictive housing covenants in the first half of the twentieth century limited where Black people in Seattle could live. Then a tech and real estate boom in the twenty-first turned redlined homes into assets for moneyed, white outsiders. Poverty. Violent Crime. The failure of public institutions—it’s all connected. In Seattle, like any city, every story is to some extent a real estate story.

A true Seattleite, Garrett uses the metaphor of the salmon swimming against the current. 

“The salmon happen to make it back each cycle, unless through man-made interventions and forces and changes to the environment they are not able to. And so that’s what we’re addressing. Those man-made impediments that have been built into the fabric of the environment: social environment, policy environment, economic environment. That has made it difficult for us to continue to spawn in the place where we’ve been.”

When Elijah talked about creating spaces, he meant this symbolically, but he also meant it literally: This was why he and Wokoma founded the Sankofa Theater. This was why he started Ethereal Visions, an agency to manage local artists and put on events. This was why he ran the Othello Marketplace. The map of Black Seattle was shrinking. Among other things, Elijah’s business ventures were meant to be a social and economic bulwark, a means to reclaim and rebuild those environments. 

He got his insurance license. He opened Cleaning to the T LLC and Heavenly Memorials, a funeral business. How many recent high school graduates do you know who would think to open a funeral business? How many do you know who would have the self-assurance and sensitivity to actually pull it off? 

In June of 2020, when the city was shut down due to Covid, and breaking out in protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Elijah and a group of fellow activists centered around Africatown began to organize events. The first was a march through the Central District they called Get Your Knee Off Our Necks. The next was a Juneteenth rally. It was the beginning of a summer spent hunkered down together, and then out on the front lines of demonstrations. It would be a transformative time for the city, but also for them personally. 

“Being in a room with other people that have the same goal, same alignment, same mentality, same mindset—it was really powerful,” says Fynniecko Glover Jr. He and Elijah had met the year before, but this was the summer when they became close.

Many of the photos published in news stories and shared on social media after Elijah died were from those 2020 protests. Elijah with a mask pulled down and a fist in the air. Elijah yelling into a megaphone. But those images alone are two-dimensional. You can’t see the work behind the scenes. You can’t see the hours of planning, of listening, of organizing that came before and after the speech.

“He was the one that was going to go make something happen,” says Glover. “If somebody needed something, Elijah was there. If we had to go talk with elders, Elijah was going to do that. If he had to go pick up volunteers, he was going to go do that. If he had to speak he was going to go do that.”

Doing this work, Elijah began to solidify his ideas about what Seattle could be and how his community might be built—or rebuilt. He began to understand, more deeply, the nature of power. It wasn’t just about police brutality. It wasn’t just about gentrification. It was about access to resources. 

Not a lot of community activists can stand before a fired-up crowd and scream in a full passion about the importance of life insurance as a means of building generational wealth and establishing an alternative to oppressive financial systems that extract Black wealth from communities. But Elijah L. Lewis was that guy. His entrepreneurship was inextricable from his activism. 

“It was business as a form of organizing,” says TraeAnna Holiday, a former Africatown administrator, mentor, and part of that group hunkered down together in the summer of 2020. It was Elijah’s life work. 

When they talk about Elijah, his niece and nephew simply call him Uncle. As if there can be no other one. The whole family sits in a booth at Lost Lake, just around the corner from where the shooting happened. They still live above the Walgreens.

“I get emotional when I pass where it happened,” says Qoty. “I don’t like to imagine it, but it’s all I can think about.”

Qing is sitting between his mom and his sister, fiddling with a straw. He’s quieter than both of them—at least tonight. He says he doesn’t think much about the man who shot him, and would rather not think about it at all, but it’s impossible when this is where it happened.

 “I remember it a lot,” he says. “Mostly when I have nothing to think about and I’m just sitting in my bed.”

After the shooting, Qing was transported to Harborview Medical Center for treatment. He was sent home early the following morning. But since the shooting, he has been reticent to leave the apartment, to be far from his family.

“He wanted to start football,” Quincy says. “All of a sudden that ended. And he couldn’t do it anyway because of his leg. The not wanting to go outside—what do you even say? You can’t say, ‘Well it’s all in your head.’ I get it, I wouldn’t want to go outside if I was shot either.” 

Now Qing will walk downstairs to the Walgreens with his older sister. He’ll leave the house with family. He’ll go to school. But when his mom or dad or sister leaves, he still needs to know exactly where they are, and whether their phone is turned on, and when they’re coming back.

He still doesn’t talk about it too much, but Quincy thinks she can see him processing in his drawings. Qing has always been an artist—like Quincy herself, and like his grandmother Jenine. He used to draw wizards and characters that already existed. But he recently started inventing his own. “They’re all superheroes,” says Quincy.

Before Christmas, Qing got a blank comic book where he could draw his own comics. 

“I drew on the cover a superhero that can turn into melted silver, and he’s flying into the sky, and the earth is behind him,” Qing says. 

Elijah Lee Lewis left us a record of his life. He was born on November 4, 1999, which means that by the time he was old enough to use social media, it was all there for him. You can scroll back for hours through his Facebook page, which remains public. You can watch videos on YouTube of Elijah showing off his new office space—complete with a blooper reel.

The timeline is full of dreams—for himself, and for the city. “He visualized and he had the aura of what he was going to be,” says Glover. “But he never got to be there. That’s part of the tragedy.” 

Elijah wanted to create a Black Seafair. He wanted to expand his financial literacy coaching program, and in fact Flourish Financial Group won a grant from King County to do just that after he was killed. He wanted to live bicoastal. He wanted a partner and kids of his own—but only when he was ready. He wanted to buy his mom a house. 

“He changed my mind about what I could do,” says his brother Mario. “You always hear, You can do anything, but I didn’t believe it because that wasn’t my life. But I saw how he captivated a whole community of people that looked just like us. I saw how he was able to change people’s minds and give them the tools to succeed in a place where we’re not expected to succeed.”

Elijah and Fynniecko Glover used to talk about creating their own city. Glover, who is studying urban planning at Alabama A&M, says they even looked at the cost of doing so in a place with cheaper land than the Seattle area. Maybe with some investments from the right people, they could’ve made it happen in the South. 

What would their city look like? Perhaps it would have been a model for the Seattle Elijah was fighting for, with institutions that empowered marginalized people to live well and build generational wealth. It would have community programming, affordable homes, public schools that prepare students to actually access the financial opportunities nearby, says Glover. 

“When they put up the Space Needle in 1962 it was to say that Seattle was a city of the future, right?” says Garrett, the CEO of Africatown. “And obviously the question is, are we moving to more of a Jetsons where there were no Black people in Orbit City? Or are we going to have a city that is inclusive of the communities that have been here and contributed and helped make the city.”

He pauses. 

“Who is the city for?”

TraeAnna Holiday hosts a talk show, The Day with Trae, on Converge Media and regularly had Elijah on as a guest. They talked for hours both on camera and off. They would talk about the fact that their community was so geographically close to the tech industry, and so impacted by it—but unable to access its well-paying jobs and signing bonuses. Instead, those always seemed to go to transplants. They talked about how newcomers almost never seemed to do the work of getting to know the communities they were moving into, never seemed to care about the culture that was there before them.

“You come here, you’ve been here for a little bit of time,” Holiday tells me over coffee in the Central District. “You have a tech job. You think you know the neighborhood because of what you’ve experienced in the time that you’ve been here. But the idea of entitlement, to me, is very strong here in this case, right? You’re entitled to these blocks. That young Black man and his nephew are not. They don’t belong. It’s not for them.”

On one of Holiday’s shows, Elijah talked about losing more than 40 people in his life—most of them to gun violence. Now he is one more person lost. Who is this city for? It’s supposed to be for Elijah. It’s supposed to be for Qing. It’s supposed to be for everybody. That was the whole point. 

Ash Kaur wants to make sure Seattle remembers Elijah as more than a victim, “more than this guy who was killed in Capitol Hill.”

“After all, that’s not who he was,” she says. “That’s just something that happened to him.”

We’ve risen from the ledge where we were sitting. The two of us stare up at Elijah’s old building: the place where he’d catch crickets with Qing and host holiday meals for his friends and dream about the city he wanted to build. The park is quiet. 

“What he was, was a force of nature; what he was, was a community advocate, a peacemaker, a community hero.”

She still has those plants.