LISA WAANANEN PHOTOS
FORMER GREYHOUND STATION
CEDAR DIVISION
Around 9:35 am on a Tuesday in September 1992, Chris Lindholm got off the bus at the Greyhound station on West Sprague, saw a black man and a white woman waiting at a change machine, pulled a .38-caliber handgun and shot them five times. “I shot him first, then her, then him, then her, then him,” Lindholm said later, after he’d been tracked down in Colorado. “I tried to hit him three times and her twice. I don’t know how it turned out.” Police, who weren’t around to respond because of understaffing, initially said it was drug-related. It turned out to be more frighteningly senseless: Lindholm, who’d come from Texas to join white
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BY LISA WAANANEN
LINCOLN
22 INLANDER MAY 15, 2014
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supremacists at Hayden Lake, had taken the victims for an interracial couple and decided they should die. Both Tracee Raider, 19, and Miguel Legrada, 29, survived. But the shooting remained an unsettling escalation from the drugs, prostitution and miscellaneous crime that had become expected on the blocks around the bus terminal. By the early ’90s the depot was long past the shining promises of its opening in 1947, when it was considered the finest and most modern bus depot in the West. It had sparkling porcelain washrooms, a barbershop, a beauty parlor, a state-of-theart restaurant. An ad proclaimed: “Every comfort imaginable.” Not long after the shooting, the buses moved elsewhere. The building was later purchased by the Cowles company, and today exists for Spokesman-Review distribution and general storage. Mustard-colored paint peels from the tiled walls along the
sidewalk, and tattered plastic covers the windows where passengers once watched for their buses and two people were once shot by the gumball machines. Lindholm, sentenced to 24 years, remains in prison.
RAINBOW CONNECTION DAYCARE On the block beyond the Plaza, where the scent of stale exhaust and cigarettes drops off into the silent canyon of the bank towers, the windows on the south side of Sprague are filled with children. In the first window, toddlers play with bright toys beneath a garland pinned with drawings on paper plates; in the next, preschoolers lay out a trail of foam squares and wear serious expressions as they treat each other’s make-believe illnesses with all the technology of modern toy medicine. But in the early afternoon, all is still. The children nap on tiny cots, with tiny hands and pudgy legs sprawled out