It was windy and the flowers had fallen over. The note on the door said that the Wing Luke Museum, right behind me, would be collecting the notes and gifts left here, archiving them for the family. I didn’t know who the guy was or what had happened, only that it wasn’t that long ago and that he seemed to be well loved, so I asked at the front desk at the Museum. He was Donnie Chin and he had been killed in a shooting incident in Seattle’s International District. He wasn’t, the reports say, the target at all, but he was in the wrong place, or maybe the right one for him. Maybe he was trying to intervene — it’s what he did — and became a victim in addition to the hero he already was.
The girl I talked to knew him, she sang his praises but also, laughed about some of the things he’d do. “He’d have these corner BBQs,” she said, “and he go buy the cheapest possible bread and get these bright red hot dogs, and that’s what he’d feed everyone. It was bad, and it was funny, and we’d just laugh.”
She told me about his work to help his neighbors in Seattle’s International District, how he’d be the guy who would know what to do while you waited for the police or the fire department to arrive. “So, he was like your neighborhood watch guy?” I asked.
“More like Batman,” she said. She was serious.
Donnie Chin was shot and killed in July of 2015. I didn’t know who he was before I found his memorial in an alley in the International District, and I’m sorry about that.
Thanks for sharing. Heroes are all around us. It’s nice to see that people care.
It was 2015 and I was walking down that Alley adjacent to Wing Luke Museum , originally Donnie Chin’s family’ grocery store in Chinatown now known as the International District. Donnie had a little gift/ thrift store and I was looking for “art stuff” for my Art installation at the Museum ( Constructs Exhibition – Five Contemporary Women Artsts. Anyway, got to talking to Donnie and asked him if he had the “ fork” to the Pilipino wooden fork & spoon set. Said, he lost the fork, asked me what I was doing so he gave me the “Spoon” – culturally speaking a feminine symbol and I thanked him. He wouldn’t stop talking so I listened, for a change. Donnie a local hero in the hood was also a Paramedic. He noticed that in the international District when there was a 911 call the EMS teams would take forever and patients either died or their care would be compromised due due to the lengthy time. As a result, he trained & started a Paramedic team of Asian descent EMS healthcare workers who served the I District in their own ambulances. Often patients were their family members and neighbors since childhood. These patients got to the appropriate ER’s in record time and lives were saved! I will never forget Donnie’s stories his heroism, generosity and charm. He died a few months after I met him, caught in the midst of gang gunfire. I heard there was a parade in the City of Seattle to honor his legacy – Amen!