A man in West Seattle died after he was zip-tied and held down by two men on Christmas Day 2020, one of whom refused to perform CPR after he stopped breathing.
Thomas Norton, 42, was homeless, and the men holding him down suspected him of stealing packages and other items, and decided to stop him themselves.
In the rapidly gentrifying West Seattle neighborhood where Norton sustained fatal injuries, neighbors said they had been frustrated for years by theft, drug activity, loud and visible crises, and homeless people.
In the years following Norton’s death, homicides of homeless people dramatically increased in King County. From 2017 to 2021, the number hovered around nine. In 2022, that number doubled, and has stayed high since. Research shows violence against homeless people is increasing nationally.
As the number of homeless people grows, their crises are increasingly brought into public view. As they try to survive life outdoors, often shuffled from one place to another, losing their belongings in the process, some resort to crimes of poverty. This can breed contempt. And contempt can turn into violence.
According to police reports, the homeowners said they did not intend to kill Norton. King County prosecutors agreed, declining to charge the men. Norton’s family is suing the pair for negligence, wrongful death and hate crimes. The men deny those allegations.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said that Seattle had decreased gun violence involving homeless people by 41% in 2023 by prioritizing bringing people inside from encampments that have had public safety issues reported at them. But with homicides of homeless people still increasing, a spokesperson for his office said, “There is clearly more work to do.”
Just this past week, unoccupied tents were run over by a driver who sped away, the second similar incident this year, in what Seattle police suspect is an intentional targeting of homeless people.
But the violence is not inevitable. Advocates say that the words public officials and residents use to talk about homeless people can either de-escalate or foment animosity, which can mean the difference between life and death.
Confrontation on Christmas Day
Tension had been building on the block in West Seattle where Norton sustained fatal injuries, home to people with a uniquely wide range of economic backgrounds.
A dilapidated home with missing siding and unfinished plywood construction sits across the street from new town homes built in 2023. Tires, kegs and a safe are among the belongings piled on the front lawn.
Neighbors said the smell of burning plastic and screaming had been spilling out of this house for years, and that many were frustrated living near the chaotic symptoms of drug use and poverty.
Right next door, in the private driveways of a cluster of older town homes, home surveillance video shows Norton pushing a red shopping cart just after midnight on Dec. 25, 2020. The Seattle Times requested the footage from the Seattle Police Department in addition to police reports and audio recordings of interviews with witnesses.
Norton, a white man of smaller stature, can be seen in another video hopping on the back of the cart, wearing dark clothes and a cap that covers most of his face. He picks up several items off the ground and tosses them into his cart, which neighbors later identified as mail packages and Christmas ornaments.
Two men come outside from separate homes to investigate at nearly the same time. One later told police he’d heard a noise in the alley. The other’s wife’s phone alerted them that their personal video camera was detecting movement outside. (The Seattle Times is not naming the men because they haven’t been charged with a crime. Norton’s family asked The Times to use his name.)
Video shows one of the men opening his front door and immediately coming face-to-face with Norton.
“What are you doing?” he yells, while moving toward Norton and grabbing the cart.
Norton, startled, takes a package out of the cart, tosses it to the ground toward the man and takes a step back. He pulls his hand back and swings it in the direction of the man and cart, grabbing the cart in the same motion. He is slightly farther than arm’s-length away and does not make contact with the man.
They struggle for control of the cart until a second man walks over and pushes Norton out of frame of the camera. The first man throws the cart to the ground on its side.
The men said they tackled Norton and restrained his hands behind his back with zip-ties because they were afraid he would continue to fight back or had weapons, according to audio recordings of those police interviews.
The commotion brought other neighbors out of their homes. Several witnesses described to police seeing Norton face down, pinned underneath the two men, with one of them on his back and the other on his legs.
A neighbor told police after the incident that one man’s knee was “somewhere either on the top of his back or possibly on his neck, but I don’t know which one.”
“When I came out, the guy was not moving at all. But he was making a sound, and it almost sounded like a snoring sound coming from him,” she said.
While they were restraining him, both of the men holding him down spoke with 911 in separate calls. In one of the call recordings, Norton can be heard making snoring or groaning sounds, which the man describes as “funny noises.”
On the call with the other man, the operator asked about these noises, which the man acknowledged but said a medic wasn’t needed because Norton was breathing.
The operator asked the second man to stay on the line until emergency responders arrived. Nine minutes in, the man said Norton wasn’t moving and that he probably needed a medic. He was told that he needed to start performing CPR.
“Not during COVID. No, not doing it,” the caller said.
“If you’re not going to do it, I need to talk to somebody else now,” the dispatcher said.
“I don’t think anybody else is — ” the caller said.
“I don’t care what you think,” the dispatcher said. “Get somebody else on the phone please.”
They argued until he transferred the phone to a neighbor who began performing CPR 3½ minutes after the caller reported Norton had stopped moving.
Police and medics arrived and took Norton to the hospital where he died three days later. A copy of his autopsy showed that the manner of his death was homicide, a result of “compressional asphyxia due to physical restraint,” with methamphetamine intoxication and cardiovascular disease as contributory conditions.
Victim of “pent-up hostility”
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office did not press charges against the two men.
Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jason Simmons explained this decision in a letter to Seattle police that the men had the right to detain Norton because it “reasonably appeared he had committed a felony.” Simmons claimed Norton tried to punch one of the men to retain property he had just stolen.
Simmons added the men did not seem like they intended to kill him or did anything that a “reasonable person would think would create a substantial risk of death.”
Norton’s family disagrees with the prosecutor and said the video evidence refutes the men’s’ claim that Norton tried to punch one of them.
“I don’t understand how any average person could have opened up their door and found somebody stealing a package on their doorstep and choose to go and chase after and attack this person,” said one of Norton’s sisters, Becci Carroll.
Norton’s ex-wife, Kristin Norton, filed a lawsuit in November against the two men and a woman involved in restraining him.
“He was a son. He was a husband. He was a father. He was just trying to survive,” Kristin Norton said. “He absolutely didn’t deserve to die over a few packages. On Christmas.”
The defendants filed responses in court denying that their actions killed Norton. They said they were recovering stolen items from Norton, and were acting in self-defense and defense of others. They claim his injuries were caused, in whole or in part, by preexisting or subsequent conditions.
Norton was held face down on the ground a few blocks away from where he and his ex-wife lived when he proposed to her.
After Thomas and Kristin married in 2010, they bought a house in Renton with a white picket fence. They were both working jobs they loved — Thomas fixing cars and Kristin as a special education teacher. And they had a son on the way.
“We had everything,” Kristin said.
But she said he was worried, both financially and about whether he could be a good father.
“It was so stressful and you could see him kind of sinking into a depression. And that’s really when things began to unravel,” Kristin said.
He disappeared for periods of time. Kristin suspected he was addicted to drugs. After multiple attempts to get him treatment, the couple separated in 2014 and Thomas began living in his car, with friends and then on the street.
During all this, he talked with his son on the phone as much as he could, sending him drawings and toy cars in the mail. When they spent time in person, Thomas would carry his son on his shoulders for miles to a park.
Thomas told Kristin about the verbal and physical abuse he would experience living outside and how people “didn’t treat him like a human.”
“He was just a victim of that pent-up hostility towards the growing problem of homelessness in general,” Norton said.
How we talk about homeless people
This February, a homeless man who was sleeping on the sidewalk on Capitol Hill was run over by a car. Within a week, a different homeless man was killed with an ax; a 25-year-old man living in a Yesler Terrace apartment has been charged with murder.
The same month Norton was killed, a man living in a Tacoma encampment was shot and killed in a suspected vigilante attack. In 2021, a man in a South Lake Union encampment was run over and killed after an altercation over a burglary. In 2022, a Tacoma cashier stabbed and killed a homeless woman who stole condoms and sunglasses from his store.
Seattle police said homicides of homeless people could be increasing partly because their population has been increasing. They said they investigate every homicide case the same, regardless of housing status.
A 2023 study involving thousands of homeless people in California found that more than a third of them had been a victim of physical assault in the past year. About half of those assaults were by strangers.
In recent years, serial killers targeting homeless people have emerged.
A man was arrested for a series of shootings targeting five homeless men between Washington, D.C., and New York in the span of nine days in 2022. Another man driving a BMW in Los Angeles gunned down three homeless men in unprovoked killings at the end of 2023. About a week later, five homeless people in an encampment in Las Vegas were shot, and one of them died.
National Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Donald Whitehead said he thinks the phenomenon is directly linked to the language used to describe people living outside.
“They have been so demonized both by elected officials, the media, people see them as less than. They don’t think that people will even acknowledge their loss or death,” Whitehead said.
He pointed at former President Donald Trump, who has suggested banning homeless camping and arresting violators.
“Our once-great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged,” Trump said in a 2023 speech.
Eric Tars, legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, added the same factors can escalate vigilante responses to crimes.
“It’s telling your constituents that these people are less worthy of protection and stoking fears around them,” Tars said. “And so it’s going to naturally lead to individuals deciding that they need to take matters into their own hands and use vigilante forms of violence.”
Many violent incidents don’t make it into the news or even get reported to police.
Nichole Alexander, who leads the outreach team at Seattle nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, said pedestrians walking by an encampment under Interstate 5 in Chinatown International District set tents on fire a half-dozen times within the span of a few months several years ago.
Karen Salinas, who leads outreach at nonprofit REACH, said encampment removals can lead to mental breakdowns in public or theft as people try to reacquire belongings they lost.
“And then the community sees that more visibly and openly hates them more,” Salinas said.
She sees the tension escalating the past two years.
“And I haven’t really seen a way for that to be dissolved.”