![]() His parents had taught him some guidelines for living in a place that was almost entirely white: Don’t talk about being black. But they were just stories, everything subterranean and easy to dismiss, because during his teenage years, Pickens had never felt discriminated against or even disliked. He was already aware of the town’s reputation - a conservative place, an insular place, a white place - and he had heard rumors in high school of police officers intimidating black drivers and of white supremacists meeting in the woods. Pickens, who was Orting’s first black police officer, was fired five days before his one-year probation period ended. Gerry Pickens discusses his current situation and unemployment. For him, Mount Rainier was just a landmark, a snow-capped peak visible for hundreds of miles. He no longer thought about the magma and molten rock churning beneath the trees and glaciers. He had grown accustomed in high school to the evacuation drills and sirens, preparing for a disaster that was always coming, until finally he stopped expecting that it would. The volcano sometimes made his wife uneasy, but Pickens told her not to worry. He found a rental house outside town, on a dead-end road with a view of the mountains. He missed the Old West feel of the one-block downtown, where the most prominent structure was a playground and where shops had names such as “Bucky’s,” “Wild Rose” and “Big J’s Outdoors.” He missed its green hillsides, its soft-and-steady rain and its two-lane roads that cut through dairy farms and daffodil fields. He had gone to high school a few miles outside town, and he had taken a pay cut to bring his wife and daughter back to the Pacific Northwest. “So happy to be home,” Pickens wrote to a friend that day. Pickens had spent three years policing on the midnight shift in Atlanta, where he had responded to hundreds of the drug crimes, break-ins and violent robberies that were only beginning to encroach on Orting as development spread south from Seattle into the valley. A local politician posted a message on Facebook: “Not a cow town anymore.” The city administrator called Pickens’s hiring “a proud moment for our modern, growing community.” The police chief said he had made “a tremendous value hire” by filling out his staff of 11 with an experienced officer. The one clear thing that first day was that there had been a subtle shift in the foundation, a change in Orting that marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. Pickens had not yet made plans to file a lawsuit unless the town paid him $5 million in damages, nearly twice the annual budget, enough to bury the town. Residents had not yet fractured into hostile groups as the pressure built, erupting onto hateful Internet message boards and petitions demanding the police chief’s resignation. The NAACP hadn’t yet arrived for a news conference. His car had not yet been spray-painted with a racial epithet and a threat. He had not yet been terminated shortly before the end of his standard probationary period. Pickens, 28, had not yet been suspended for an allegation of stealing that was never substantiated. “Congratulations! Welcome to our team,” read a letter that Pickens received with his badge.Įighteen months later, if Orting can still agree on anything about Pickens’s arrival, it is that his first day was also his best day - the one when questions of race and policing still felt like problems for bigger towns. The place once known as “The White City,” in part for its lack of diversity, had hired a black police officer, its first since the town’s founding in 1889. Gerry Pickens stopped downtown to pick up his badge, and only then did it become obvious in Orting that this hire was unlike any the town had made before. Here, in the driver’s seat, came Orting’s newest employee, a police officer in a place where crime had begun to rise. ![]() Here came three more people into one of the state’s fastest-growing communities. The truck was loaded down with a handmade crib, a living room set and a sign designed to hang on a front door. So at first nobody paid much attention in the fall of 2013 when what came winding around the mountain and into the valley was another U-Haul carrying a new family into town. The only question was when it would finally blow. Tension was always building inside the volcano, considered the country’s most dangerous, a pressure that intensified with each foundational shift in the earth. They had sirens for lava, sensors for earthquakes and alarms for the volcanic mudflow that geologists believed would one day bury the town. Life for Orting’s 8,000 residents depended on predicting what would one day come roaring down the slopes of Mount Rainier, 30 miles away. They were so preoccupied with the volcano shadowing their town, with forecasts and evacuation drills, that few people here noticed the other disaster taking shape around them.
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