The lasting harm of Washington's deadliest mass shooting

The shooting at the Wah Mee Club 40 years ago left 13 people dead. The way the story showed up in the news inflicted long term harm to Seattle's CID and Chinese American communities.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the deadliest mass shooting in Washington state history. It started with a robbery at the Wha Mee Club in Seattle's Chinatown International District. It ended with 13 people murdered.

Two men were ultimately convicted for those murders and a third served 28 years in prison for robbery and assault.

Longtime Seattleites remember the Wha Mee shootings as a tragedy. Maleeha Syed, a communities reporter at Crosscut, says the CID community endured a second blow. The way the story was portrayed on the 5 o'clock news and in newspapers hurt Chinese Americans and the CID neighborhood for years to come.

"A lot of the people who died in the shooting were community members," Syed said. "So people knew them, either they worked with them went to school with them. They were friends of friends."

That story didn't come through in the mainstream narratives of the event. Instead, the shooting was treated as a crime story.

"And there were just implications that came with that," Syed said. "One source said the widespread impression was that this was gang related. And it wasn't at all. I mean, it was just this really tragic incident that happened because three people were robbing this club."

Syed said the Wah Mee murders were reported differently by mainstream publications and community led news. When people in the community didn't speak to reporters, they were seen as suspicious or as if they had something to hide. Syed says this further perpetuated stereotypes about Asian Americans.

Maleeha Syed spoke with Soundside about her reporting on the shooting at Wah Mee and how community reporters told a different story from mainstream publications.