Good Morning! The weather is goddamn beautiful—highs in the 80s and sunny—which is a delightful contrast to everything you’re about to read.

Let’s do the news.

(If you get to the end, there’s some butt jokes, as a treat.)

Trump Is Afraid of Teachers: Last week, ICE arrested and detained Fernando Rocha, a theater manager at Juanita High School in Kirkland. His lawyer told the Seattle Times that Rocha entered the US on a tourist visa in 2018, and before it expired, he applied for asylum. The case is still pending. Meanwhile, ICE Seattle claimed on Twitter that Rocha was wanted in Brazil for theft, a claim that his family in Brazil called “outlandish.” 

Harrell Wants to Watch You Stumble Home Drunk: Or sunbathe in Cal Anderson. Or go to high school. Last week, Harrell and SPD Chief Shon Barnes claimed that the city’s pilot program for their Real Time Crime Center was a roaring success (ok, Batman). The surveillance program put CCTV cameras along Aurora Avenue North, the downtown Third Avenue corridor, and the Chinatown-International District, and integrated them with their favorite new Automated License Plate Readers into a super secret data center (it’s SPD headquarters). Barnes says they’ve assisted in 90 active criminal investigations in 60 days, but didn’t say what the investigations were (we asked and we’ll report back). Now, Harrell wants to do the same in Cal Anderson, the Capitol Hill Night Life District, and Garfield High School. What could go wrong?

Serial Rapist Sentenced in Everett: Christian Sayre, a former Everett bar owner, was sentenced to 109 years for 16 counts of second-degree rape, third-degree rape of a child, indecent liberties, and possession of depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Prosecutors say Sayre used his bar in Everett as a staging ground to prey on his victims.  Everett Police Chief John DeRousse said in a statement that it was “one of the most complex and disturbing cases” the department has handled. Sayre’s attorney asked that he get 17 and a half years. The prosecutors asked for 133. Judge Millie Judge (not a typo) went with 109, citing the length and breadth of Sayre’s crimes.

WA Child Welfare Isn’t So Well: According to the office that oversees the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, critical injuries for kids in the state’s welfare system took a huge jump in the first half of this year. By the end of June, at least 92 children had died or nearly died, up from 78 in the first six months of 2024. Some Republicans are trying to blame the bipartisan Keep Families Together Act, but fentanyl is the likelier culprit. So far this year, 20 of the cases involving kids under 4 years old were caused by accidental fentanyl exposure.

Blue Angel Blues: We’re approaching the season when literal fighter jets swoop around our city like a playground, and some Seattleites are over it. The Airshow Climate Action coalition put up a new billboard on Rainier Ave that reads: “SAY NO TO BLUE ANGELS.” Think of the rescue dogs! Think of the military trauma! Or think of the 670 tons of carbon emissions they blow through in one weekend.

Crunching Some Numbers: We’re well into Primary Election Season, so we at The Stranger decided to take another look at the money Katie Wilson and Bruce Harrell have taken in. As we’ve reported before, the two are neck and neck in fundraising, but we noticed a couple key differences. First, almost $60,000 of Harrell’s donations came from outside of Seattle (the city he’d like to keep governing), compared to Wilson’s $7,207. And among his donors, 19 of them are CEOs. (The only time “chief” comes up in Katie’s donor list is a Chief Policy and Strategy Officer for the Highline School District.)

I’m just gonna put this thread from Mark Ostrow here.

 

Ok the mayor is speaking. “I embrace the wealthy.”

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— Qagggy! (@qagggy.bsky.social) July 22, 2025 at 6:26 PM

 

A Little Brain Break: In lighter news, we sent Stranger Staff Writer Audrey Vann, a non-Katy Perry fan, to Monday’s Katy Perry concert at Climate Pledge. She learned a lot. “Before winning me over with an emotional performance of ‘Pearl,’ she had lost me with a megachurch-style sermon about her space voyage,” Vann writes. “She had long dreamed of going to space, she said, and despite her dreams being dismissed, she feels that she ultimately ‘manifested’ her trip on Blue Origin. ‘Part of me did it so that I could let go of any last bit of fear that I had, because I knew that was when my life would begin again,’ she said, tearing up. ‘And to any other girl that has a dream, you go and do it!’ This drew attention to a major discrepancy in her brand regarding female empowerment—she preaches and sings about overcoming adversity (see: ‘Roar and ‘Rise’), but the things she has overcome in her life are deeply unrelatable.” 

Plus, we got a new list of Katyisms out of the deal:

“I’m a Scorpio, bitch!”
“Is the internet real, or is this what’s real?”
“I dedicate [‘I Kissed A Girl’] to the community—the ones who raised me, the ones that called me out, and the ones that educated me, and for all the little girls in between like myself.”
“Love is love! It’s not a gender, it’s a frequency, so tap into it, baby!”
“What’s up, Amazon family?”

And if you still need a breath before we get into national and international news, spend some time in a basement with The Stranger’s Charles Mudede.

Fascism Is Tacky: The administration that populates its Instagram feed with AI-generated images of eagles, money, and the DJT Jerk Off Dance just withdrew from UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency. This is the second time in as many terms that Trump has pulled us out of the organization. In a comment to the New York Times, a State Department spokesperson accused UNESCO of promoting “divisive social and cultural causes” (Palestinians’ right to exist, mostly) and maintaining an “outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda” at odds “with our America First foreign policy.” Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House after Melania.

Apparently this is art now.

No Charges for Bad Cops: You’ve probably seen the video already. Sheriff’s officers in Jacksonville, Florida, pulled William Anthony McNeil Jr. over for not having his headlights on and not wearing a seatbelt. When McNeal questioned why he was pulled over and refused to get out of the car, an officer smashed his window, punched him in the face, wrestled him out of the car, punched him again, and forced him to the ground while shouting “Stop resisting!” Prosecutors say that the officers didn’t break the law, and the Sheriff’s office is still investigating to see if any internal policies were violated. Sheriff T.K. Waters said the cellphone video doesn’t tell the full story. “Cameras can only capture what can be seen and heard,” he said at a news conference Monday. “So much context and depth are absent from recorded footage because a camera simply cannot capture what is known to the people depicted in it.” Don’t worry, T.K., it captured the racism just fine.

Israel Strikes WHO Site: Israel attacked a World Health Organization’s site in central Gaza, an area that Israel has largely avoided because it believed Israeli hostages were being held there. Israel doesn’t deny raiding the facility but said any “suspects” had been treated “in accordance with international law.” Whatever the fuck that means at this point.

Don’t Put That Up There: A Tokyo-based designer made a butt plug bottle with an egg-shaped, rounded bottom designed to nestle into the sand on the beach, and presented it at the 2nd International Conference on Design for Ocean Environments, which sounds very respectable. But as Mathew Rodriguez wrote for Them: “Murphy’s law tells us that what can go wrong will go wrong. Godwin’s law says that any online discussion will eventually devolve into one person comparing the other to a Nazi. To this esteemed list, let me add Gere’s law, named, of course, after the long-debunked but persistent myth that actor Richard Gere once stuck a gerbil up his butt: If it looks like someone can put it up their butt, they’ll want to.”

 

 

Never Say Die: John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne died yesterday at 76, just two weeks after playing Black Sabbath’s farewell show.