REVIEW BAINBRIDGE ISLAND
MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN: Garrett Madison takes on the big three. A3
FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2012 | Vol. 112, No. 20 | WWW.BAINBRIDGEREVIEW.COM | 75¢
Rocky start to Ostling trial
Baseballarama! Museum hits a home run with big event
Defense asks for mistrial during opening arguments
BY RICHARD D. OXLEY Bainbridge Island Review
Grease your gloves and get ready to swing for the fence. It’s time for Baseballarama, the island’s celebration of all things baseball. The Bainbridge Island Historical Museum will host an all-baseball afternoon Saturday, May 19 to celebrate the island’s history and love of the national pastime. The Mariner Moose will be in the lineup for photo opportunities and hall-of-famers’ Babe Ruth and Pee Wee Reese’s uniforms will be on display. The museum will also present a collection of island memorabilia from its baseball past. “We’re having a display of baseball memorabilia, most of it is Bainbridge Island-related,” said Chuck “Bunny” Callaham, an island ballplayer who helped organize the event. “We’re gonna have hot dogs and popcorn, baseball-style,” he added. It might seem a bit out of left field, but the island has always had a passion for baseball. Since the 1920s, baseball teams sprung up from communities across the island. “They were mostly town teams. In the ‘20s and early ‘30s, there were teams in Creosote and Blakely,” said Reid Hanson, who played baseball for Bainbridge High School in the late 1940s, in addition to playing for various other local teams. Teams would also form from workers at the creosote plant, the mill at Port Blakely, or the shipyards in Winslow. “When I started playing in the ‘40s we had a team from the Winslow
BY BRIAN KELLY Bainbridge Island Review
Bainbridge Historical Museum photo
Baseball teams sprung up on the island out of its many work centers such as the Winslow shipyards and the mill in Blakely Harbor. They played each other as well as teams through out the Puget Sound. The Mariner Moose will make a guest appearance at Saturday’s event.
The basics of Baseballarama! When: 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday, May 19. Where: Bainbridge Island Historical Museum. Cost: Free. Shipyard, this was during World War II,” he said. “There were ballfields in Port Blakely, and Creosote, and Winslow. They all had uniforms and balls and bats,” Hanson said. Though supplies weren’t always easy to come by. Hanson recalls taping up cracked bats to keep them in the game. The teams would play each other and tour around the area, facing
teams from Seattle, Bremerton and beyond. Fervor for the sport was so high that nearly each island team had their own ballfield. SEE MUSEUM, A8 Photo courtesy of the Seattle Mariners
TACOMA — The trial on the civil rights lawsuit against the city of Bainbridge Island got off to a contentious start Monday before the eight-member jury ever took their seats. Lawyers on behalf of the Ostlings — the Bainbridge Island family suing Bainbridge police for shooting their mentally ill son, Douglas Ostling, after they responded to a 911 call at the family home in October 2010 — protested the details that the city’s attorneys planned to share about Ostling with the jury. Those details paint a starkly different portrait than the one presented by the family’s attorneys.
Victim intoxicated Lawyers for the city said Ostling was intoxicated when he met police officers at his apartment door holding a double-bladed ax, and said Ostling had a history of violent behavior and thoughts, including fantasies where he killed his father. Lawyers for the family, however, have maintained that Ostling was not violent toward others, and had no known history of violent crime or physical violence. The trial began earlier this week in a federal courtroom in Tacoma. Before the jury was seated, Julie Kays, an attorney for the Ostling family, asked U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Leighton to exclude information from the trial that showed Ostling was intoxicated at the time police claim he came at them with an ax, and was shot twice. The autopsy for Ostling,
conducted the day after he was shot and killed by Bainbridge Police Officer Jeff Benkert, found that Ostling “had been consuming alcoholic beverages shortly before his death.” Kays asked the judge to keep that evidence out of the trial. The defense wanted to use that, and other information, she told the judge, “As a way to say Doug’s a bad guy, Doug was armed that night ... look at the problem he himself caused.” Attorneys on the other side, she said, wanted to engage in a blatant “bashing of Doug” before the jury. Kays said the information was irrelevant, as it was unknown to police at the time of the confrontation.
Called an ‘X factor’ Richard Jolley, an attorney for the city, said it was an “X factor” in the incident. He also noted that part of the lawsuit is based on the notion that police officers should have gotten more information about Ostling from his parents before they approached the mentallyill man on the night of his death, and the topic was sure to come up during the crossexamination of the parents when they took the witness stand. The judge agreed with the defense. “Nobody can sanitize their clients. They can’t, you can’t,” Leighton said. “It’s in the mix.” “It’s what happened at that time,” he added. “It’s going to come in.” But the judge also warned both sides about SEE TRIAL, A18