Former Camas Magazine editor Larry Shook has published “Deathtrap,” a must-read answer to the question of what-ever-happened to the River Park Square criminal investigation, and the inquiry into Jo Savage’s tragic death.
Veteran Spokane investigative reporter Larry Shook has published a 25-page article, “Deathtrap,” that looks, in gripping detail, at the thus-far futile efforts to compel state and federal law enforcement authorities to bring criminal charges in the April 2006 death of Jo Savage. Savage died minutes after her car broke through a retaining structure and plunged out of the north side of the Cowles family’s multi-story River Park Square parking structure adjacent to the River Park Square mall and Spokane City Hall.
With the statute of limitations for criminal charges rapidly coming to a close, Shook traces the efforts of two former police officers, Tony Bamonte and Ron Wright, as they’ve separately gone door to door with evidence they believe shows that Savage’s death was no mere accident, but the almost inevitable result of
documented structural and maintenance deficiencies that the garage owners knew about.
Shook’s report frames the context for the appeal that Bamonte made earlier this week to Spokane County Commissioners and state Attorney General Rob McKenna (attached to 92 exhibits) that they take action to close the garage and that McKenna see that a grand jury is empaneled to look into alleged criminal activity.
“This documentation,” Bamonte wrote, “establishes evidence of criminal activity, corruption and subsequent cover-ups involving specific members of the Cowles family, the Spokane County sheriff, and prosecutor, and the Spokane police chief and mayor surrounding Savage’s death.
Bamonte’s petition and Shook’s new story comes just a week after the Spokesman-Review’s Jonathan Brunt disclosed the existence of an explosive declaration by Rex Franklin, a former Cowles employee who, according to his statement, resigned as RPS garage manager in 1994.
While he worked at the garage, Franklin wrote, two or three of the spandrels (concrete panels which form the garage’s exterior walls) had to be replaced each year because of impacts from vehicles. After an especially bad collision in 1991 where a spandrel broke and “collapsed outward,” Franklin says he was ordered to “go through the garage with a can of red spray paint” and mark the spandrels he thought “should be repaired or replaced.”
“I did as directed,” he wrote in the 2006 declaration, “and when I finished, I had marked so many spandrels that the RPS owners decided it was not economically feasible to replace all of them. Based upon my own current observations within the garage, few if any of the spandrels which I had marked for replacement or repair have had the benefit of any attention to date.”
On April 8, 2006, Jo Savage died when her car collided with a spandrel and the collapsing barrier essentially hooked her car and flung it forward, out of the garage, and onto a ramp below.
Franklin wrote that based on “red spray paint markings” on the spandrel, he believed the barrier Savage struck was one he’d marked, more than a decade earlier, to be replaced.
Among the other remarkable episodes that Shook has documented in his new article is one involving current KREM-2 anchorman Randy Shaw and Steve Rudd, whom Shook describes as “one of the Northwest’s top construction fraud investigators.”
Shook reports that when Shaw worked at KHQ-TV (the NBC affiliate in Spokane, owned by the Cowleses) Rudd provided evidence to Shaw (with whom he’d worked on earlier investigative stories for broadcast) that the remodeled RPS garage was not inspected and appeared to suffer from poor workmanship and materials. Shook reports that Shaw confirmed Rudd’s account that a broadcast story based on those disclosures was nixed by Shaw’s superiors.
Shook has won national awards for his past reporting on River Park Square and the Cowles family’s newspaper. A Vietnam combat-veteran, Shook came to Spokane in the 1970′s with his wife, Judy Laddon, to publish Spokane Magazine. In 2000, he teamed up with Laddon and fellow investigative reporter Tim Connor to publish the on-line Camas Magazine which won several national and regional awards for its inquiry into the River Park Square public/private partnership. Shook is now working on a book about the River Park Square fiasco.
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