Casino Shootout Survivor Offers Suggestions

Lessons aplenty to be learned from casino shootout survivor
Karrie Collins of Black Diamond was too busy trying to stop violence here and abroad to celebrate her 37th birthday.
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; STAFF WRITER

Karrie Collins of Black Diamond was too busy trying to stop violence here and abroad to celebrate her 37th birthday.

She was occupied with gang prevention work with Tacoma’s Safe Streets. She’s close to earning her master’s degree in psychology, and she was working on a paper. Her focus, with her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, is on effective ways to reduce violent behavior. She had her volunteer work with a group advocating peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people.

But on July 23, a few weeks after her birthday, friends persuaded her to take a break and go to Club Galaxy at the Muckleshoot Casino near Auburn.

“It’s only the second time in my life I’ve ever been in that casino,” Collins recalled. “There’s a dance club in the center. They have a DJ, and it was really packed. Really, really, really packed.”

She monitored the crowd, and when she saw what she suspected were gang members getting together, she got nervous.

“I told my friends we should go,” she said. “We went out onto the floor one last time.”

They were dancing when she heard “clack, clack.”

“I knew what it was. I’ve been in shootings before,” she said. “I was at the optometrist’s at the Walmart shooting of the armored car driver.”

A friend who had arrived from Iraq two months ago froze. She grabbed him and ran toward the bar to get behind it.

“When more shots came, we dove down and hit the deck really hard. I hurt my knee, and people started trampling over us.”

People desperate to get behind something flipped tables over and hid. People desperate to get out tripped over tables and chairs and each other. The “clack, clack, clack” went on until seven people had been shot.

Cesar Vielma-Chaparro, 42, is accused of shooting his estranged wife, the man she was dancing with, her sister and four people he didn’t know. They were hit in the face, the chest, the head, the torso.

He is jailed on $1 million bond and, if convicted, faces a sentence of 89 to 101 years.

It is beyond irony that a woman whose life is about making and keeping peace was mere feet away from the shooter.

It is also a chance to learn from her perspective. That includes a youth misspent on drugs, fighting and gangs, and an adulthood salvaged through military service in the Balkans in the late 1990s.

Collins has a list. Every idea on it is complex, and every one, done right, will save lives and trauma.

• “Domestic violence is really out of control,” she said. “That is really what happened that night.”

Attack it from every angle, she says: education, counseling, treatment, prison, eliminating prostitution, cutting abusers’ access to guns, creating safe places for victims.

• “Why don’t these casinos have metal detectors?” she demanded. “They have a lot of money, a lot of alcohol. When you mix alcohol and money and things like that, you are bound to have some violence.”

• Invest in diverting kids away from gangs. A mass shooting at a south King County car show the same weekend reportedly involved gangs.

School policies, and teachers, geared to help kids hurt and humiliated at home can do it. Neighborhood programs that provide safety and encouragement can do it. They’re cheaper than chucking a kid into a life of courts and prison.

“That’s why I do prevention,” she said. “It saves money. If you are able to stir their spirit back to life, they know they can still do the things they dreamed of as kids.”

• Cut the drama.

“There are so many young people living under occupation and war who would just give anything to have a chance to live peacefully,” Collins said. “It’s really interesting the way youth in America think. It’s crazy. We’ve really addicted them to drama and violence.”

We can do better by them.

If we do, we might make the weekends safe for dancing and car shows. And for people like Karrie Collins to take a well-deserved break.