A2 • Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Issaquah Press
Rooster wranglers ruffle feathers Concerned citizens want a move to warmer location; new coop offered By David Hayes Issaquah Press reporter Issaquah icon McNugget the rooster became the center of controversy Dec. 8 and 9 when a group of concerned citizens were blocked from moving him to a warmer environment. Kristen Parshall and her friend Debby Welsh, both of Fall City, became worried about McNugget’s welfare in the face of temperatures reaching overnight lows in the teens and below. “Our biggest concern is the winters,” said Parshall, a former employee of Pasado’s Safe Haven. “He needs to be in a coop with a heat lamp.”
Their efforts were met by those who disagreed, saying McNugget had ample care at the Your Espresso stand and had survived just fine in previous winters. “McNugget eats three times a day and gets fresh water provided as a second source of water intake,” barista Candice Mercado wrote in an e-mail. “McNugget uses the small creek mostly for all his drinking needs. He never leaves the property and if a rooster were unhappy, he would have left over five years ago.” Parshall said Welsh called the nearby Issaquah Grange Supply the next day, this time asking for permission to remove McNugget. McNugget escaped from the
Grange years ago during a customer appreciation day event. Grange General Manager Gary Olson said McNugget was brought in as part of the petting zoo, but somehow got away. The rooster later adopted the parking lot of the Staples store as its new home. Employees of the espresso stand in the lot adopted the rooster and gave him his name and a crate for shelter. Your Espresso owner Michelle Schneider said customers, baristas and local residents all provided feed for McNugget over the years, enough to give him three square meals a day. About three years ago, Parshall, a regular customer of the espresso
Lost: Unsolved mystery is baffling FROM PAGE A1
In the decades since the disappearance, the unsolved mystery baffled investigators and stalled when evidence eluded detectives. The case gathered dust for years at the King County Sheriff’s Office, with investigators stymied by scarce evidence and witnesses whose memories were blurred by time and pain. Detectives revived the investigation in April with a federal grant meant to solve decades-old cold cases. Days after authorities announced the new Cold Case Unit, a detective interviewed a Lewis County man about the disappearance. But the case has produced no arrests. The events renewed attention, too, in Issaquah, where longtime residents recall the fruitless Tiger Mountain search. The investigation also forced the Adamses to confront the grief and unanswered questions associated with the disappearance.
BY GREG FARRAR
Don and Ann Adams have never moved from the Issaquah area, more than 40 years after their son David disappeared from their Tiger Mountain neighborhood. ‘He was a bright little boy. He excelled at school,’ Ann Adams said. As the decades passed, however, accounts and recollections were muddied because news organizations — including The Issaquah Press — repeated incorrect information in the years since the disappearance. ‘A garden-variety 8-year-old boy’ The year he disappeared, David was a third-grader at Clark Elementary School. “He was like most any other 8year-old boy, sweet and naughty at the same time, loud, and just liked to play and do the things little boys play,” Ann Adams said when asked
Let there be hope.
Merry Christmas Issaquah Fund
Helping neighbors help themselves
Total: $9,337 from 55 donors
2009 Fund Goal: $50,000 Thank You! to this week’s donors: The Harringtons, in honor of Jerry & Wendy Blackburn Dale & Jeanett DePriest Dorothy Clark St. Michael’s Singalong Eastside Home Association Barbara & Matthew LePage Kiwanis Club of Providence Point Ronald & Shirley Koger Susan & Bernard Wright Cougar Mountain Veterinary Hospital Leo & Rose Finnegan L. & R. Skinner Marinell Schmidt Robert & Rebecca Hazel Michael & Sandra Nygaard J.D. & Kit Brown The Rezendes Family Joseph MacDonald Thomas & Sally Montgomery Joyce Johnson Bjorn & Gail Sorensen Beverly Huntington Andrew, Elise, Carolyn & Ned Nelson Nancy Viney Ivan & Diane Lee Hank & Jackie Thomas Mary Ann Hult Dan & Maria Menser Edwin & Joan Smithers Steven & Carla Hoffman Mary Fricke, in memory of James L. Fricke Joyce Kormanyos Five anonymous
to describe her lost son. “He was a bright little boy. He excelled at school.” Ann and Don Adams raised a close-knit family — six children in the house on Tiger Mountain, where the Adamses still live today. A daughter was born a few years after David disappeared. “He was just pretty much a garden-variety 8-year-old boy, endearing and frustrating at the same time,” said Ann Adams, now 76. And, she added with a laugh, “probably the bane of his teacher’s existence very often.” David, the second oldest, had a mischievous streak, Ann Adams recalled. She remembered a photograph from Easter, with her oldest daughter, Jill, in a frilly Easter dress, and David beside her in a holiday outfit. Look closely at the photo, Ann Adams recalled, and notice David holding fingers aloft above Jill’s head to make rabbit ears, with “just a glint in his eye of mischief.” David had dark hair and striking blue eyes, like his mother. In the most common photo of him — the picture reproduced on playing cards with photos of missing people — David wears a bright rustcolored shirt, but the eyes capture attention first. Jill Stephenson was not yet a kindergartener when her older brother disappeared. Though she recalls little about David, she said she remembers those blue eyes.
stand, provided a home upgrade to a doghouse and stopped by occasionally to feed him. She and Welsh’s concern for McNugget peaked when the temperatures dropped to overnight lows of 10 degrees. “It also looked like his comb was frost-bitten,” Welsh said. “I just felt so bad for him, standing there shivering while I was feeding him.” Parshall said she later offered Schneider hundreds of dollars to purchase McNugget, but the offer was declined. “I would leave them alone if they put up a proper coop with a heating lamp,” she added. Schneider said that over the past weekend a couple of her employees
Stephenson also recalls the day David vanished. She was playing in the backyard with her brothers when a neighbor told them David was missing. Rob Killian shared a desk with David at Clark. The boys went to the same church, and attended each other’s birthday parties. Killian said he remembers most the brittle silences in the years after David disappeared. “I am not sure if I have blocked all of these memories, but I remember being quiet around his family a lot in the days and months later,” he recalled. “There was such fragility and silence.” Killian, now a Seattle physician who runs a group family practice and works with HIV patients, said the 1968 school year came to a hushed, somber close. “My desk, the double desk,” Killian recalled, “eventually got cleaned out and I sat alone the rest of the school year.” A fateful day Friday, May 3, 1968: David rode the bus from Clark to the stop along Southeast Tiger Mountain Road. David and the oldest Adams son, Steven, walked from the stop to the house where the family had moved less than two weeks earlier. After school, David went to play with Kevin Bryce, then 6, a friend from church. Although the Adamses were new to Tiger Mountain, the family had worshipped with the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation for years. Don and Ann Adams and their five children settled on the Eastside after Don Adams accepted a job with Boeing. Don Adams, a captain in the Air Force Reserve, was called back to active duty after the Pueblo incident — a Cold War flashpoint in January 1968, when North Korea seized a U.S. Navy surveillance ship. By early May, Don Adams, now 77, was stationed in Oklahoma for Air Force training. Meanwhile, on the first Friday in May, David and Kevin walked on Tiger Mountain from the Adams house to the Bryce residence. The boys used the fateful shortcut, a path beaten across a field. The trail led behind the Adams house to a gravel road, now 241st Avenue Southeast. David and Kevin crunched down
BY DAVID HAYES
McNugget the rooster, the center of controversy in a dispute to move him to a warmer climate, gets some sun in the Staples parking lot last week. had offered to take McNugget to their family’s farm, where they have chickens and a coop. But the offer proved unnecessary. “I called both the Renton Animal Control and King County Animal Control,” Schneider said. “Both said to just leave the rooster alone. So, that’s what I’m going to do.” She added that if animal control
the gravel road, crossed a bridge above 15 Mile Creek and headed up the hill toward the Bryce house. The boys used a trail worn by the Bryce children, instead of using the driveway circling the front of the house. At about 5 p.m., David was due home for dinner. Ann Adams planned to take the children to J.C. Penney in Bellevue to buy shoes. David asked his mother on the telephone if he could stay awhile longer. “I did tell him to come home because dinner was nearly ready and we were going to go down” to Bellevue, Ann Adams recalled. Kevin walked with David to the 15 Mile Creek bridge, and then asked if David knew how to get home. David said he could find the
Park FROM PAGE A1
Sammamish is willing to take it.” Planners in both cities would need to amend the respective comprehensive plans, or growth blueprints, to incorporate a redrawn potential annexation area. Sammamish City Manager Ben Yazici sent a letter to Issaquah Mayor Ava Frisinger in early December to ask Issaquah municipal staffers to draft a letter to the King County Growth Management Planning Council, the group set up to guide development. Besides approval from the Issaquah and Sammamish councils, changes to the potential annexation area would require nods from the growth management board and King County Council. Issaquah officials discussed the proposal at a Council Land Use Committee meeting last week, where members noted how existing growth plans limit options for the potential annexation area. “As long as that PAA stays in Issaquah’s comprehensive plan, there are only two possible actions — either it stays in the county or Issaquah annexes it,” Councilman John Rittenhouse, the committee chairman, said during the Dec. 8 meeting. Another remote option exists: Klahanie residents could incorporate the area as a city, though residents at the meeting said the cost to provide municipal services would be prohibitive. Voters in the potential annexation area defeated a 2005 proposal to join Issaquah, even though 67 percent of voters approved annexation. But the Issaquah City Council balked because fewer voters — 47 percent — agreed to shoulder a portion of the city’s debt. Issaquah and Sammamish officials discussed redrawing the potential annexation area in late 2007, but the proposal withered in both cities. Like King County, Issaquah and Sammamish are under pressure to annex developments just outside city limits because county
officials told her McNugget needed to be moved to a farm, she would have acted without hesitation. Olson offered to provide a chicken coop hand-crafted by a Grange employee should a new home not be found for McNugget. Even so, Olson said a coop does not provide a surefire safehouse for the rooster. “The reality is no chicken is absolutely safe in a coop,” he said. “Predators, like raccoons, have gotten into coops on my farm and killed chickens. So, it’s not a sure bet, but it is better, keeping him out of the wind.” He said providing a coop is still not the end of the situation. Someone has to be committed to stay at the end of the day and lock McNugget safely inside the coop and again let him out in the morning. Those logistics have yet to be worked out. David Hayes: 392-6434, ext. 237, dhayes@isspress.com. Comment at www.issaquahpress.com.
way, and he headed down the trail. After 15 minutes or so, Ann Adams called back to the Bryce house to tell David he needed to leave. David, she was told, left right after she had first spoken with him. Ann Adams and neighbors canvassed the neighborhood, calling for David and asking others if they had seen the boy. “Hours passed and they couldn’t find him. The authorities became involved,” she said. Within hours, a massive search would unfold on Tiger Mountain. Neighbors looked through the night. David was nowhere to be found. Warren Kagarise: 392-6434, ext. 234, or wkagarise@isspress.com. Comment at www.issaquahpress.com.
leaders want to shed the role of managers of unincorporated urban areas, like Klahanie. The park decision became the focus in the annexation discussion in August, when thenCounty Executive Kurt Triplett announced Klahanie Park would be closed. Sammamish officials then moved to secure the park. Issaquah leaders were uninterested in taking on the park and associated maintenance costs. Despite the effort to keep Klahanie Park open, neighborhood residents worry about the move by Sammamish into the community — a move some Klahanie residents view as a prelude to annexation. Klahanie resident Michelle Kolano addressed the Issaquah City Council last week, and said she felt uneasy about changes related to the park transfer. Kolano said residents consider the 64-acre park as a “crown jewel” in the neighborhood. “We’ve been in existence for 25 years, and to be absorbed or partially absorbed by a city who only has 10 years under their belt is very alarming,” she said during the Dec. 7 meeting. Development in Klahanie started in the mid-1980s and lasted about a decade. Sammamish was incorporated in August 1999. “We identify with Issaquah, we shop here, we were here before there was a Sammamish,” Kolano said. “It just doesn’t make sense to us for a part of our community to be absorbed by Sammamish.” In the letter to Frisinger, Yazici noted how Issaquah officials were uninterested in the park. Negotiations between Sammamish and King County officials will enable Sammamish to acquire the park. Kolano urged Issaquah officials to reconsider the decision not to acquire Klahanie Park. “We would really, really appreciate it if that sometime the Issaquah City Council would again revisit the idea of annexation,” she said. “And, in the interim, possibly think about taking over the stewardship of Klahanie Park.”
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