By Peggy Sturdivant

On the way to arrange for a story interview that I thought would be uplifting for the holidays I crossed paths with a man in a red hat on a different path. Hudson stopped to put some belongings in the back of an old pick-up truck and then we both found ourselves waiting for the owner of the Spirit Gas Station at 24th and Market.

Overhearing the name Ballard News-Tribune this man in the hat with tassels wanted to know if I’d written about him some four years earlier. “You’re in the paper,” he said someone told him, after the incident at the Jack-in-the-Box on Leary Way. Not me, I told him explaining that the crime reports are generally taken straight from Seattle Police reports.

I needed breakfast and coffee but this man’s account of his version of what the Ballard News-Tribune, June 16, 2010 Police Blotter headlined as “Woman, dog, threatened at knifepoint” was riveting, and it was a breakfast story.

According to Hudson at about 6:30 a.m. he was on his way in for his regular, two Breakfast Jacks and an orange juice, when he felt threatened by an unleashed dog. Hudson told me he was a fisherman, and he was in his waders and dressed for work, including the fishing knife that he kept in his back left pocket, to be able to cut lines. The recollections sidetracked briefly to a description of a pit bull attack and why he felt endangered. According to him the dog’s owner, a woman, then came out the restaurant and said if you hurt my dog I’ll hurt you.

The narrative continued through the arrival of five police cars and Hudson’s arrest for Assault-Aggravated w/Weapon. There was a lot more detail on Hudson’s part as to whether the dog in question was really a service dog, whether the woman accusing him of assault on her and her dog was a panhandler and whether the blade length of the knife fit the definition of a dangerous weapon. I heard the story out, through a reported mid-trial call to Lummi Fish Supply to get the knife dimension. Hudson asked his attorney to explain that it was a tool of his trade; if he had been a carpenter it would have been a hammer.

The man’s story stayed with me all day. I read the crime reports but probably give too little thought to a fuller description of the circumstances, and how the words can stick. Hudson told me the woman with the dog was white. I was the one who voiced the question as to whether five police cars (his number) responded because dispatch radioed ‘black male with a knife.’ Everyone sees things differently and accounts will differ. Haven’t we seen that in trying to make sense of the release of the Grand Jury testimony in Ferguson?

I combed the archives until I found what was the BNT’s on-line “Police Blotter,” after that I was able to locate the Seattle Police Department Online Report for June 11, 2010; the full report no longer available online. I was fascinated by points of agreement, and disagreement. When the victim says she’s going to call the police, the suspect says, ‘go ahead.’ In her account she says that she told him that if he’s going to cut her dog’s throat, then he’ll have to cut hers first. Supposedly the suspect agrees.

I spent one of those strange days and then dream-filled nights mulling how we determine the truth. By 5 a.m. the question had become what is truth? Everyone had a backstory before this unfortunate convergence just after 6:30 a.m. In the end neither dog nor woman was cut. Hudson was arrested and served 28 days.

The morning after meeting Hudson I telephoned a man he calls a friend. He confirmed that Hudson is a friend, he’s smart, and yes, he was a fisherman before his eyes went. His advice for his friend Hudson is the same as it has been for many years, in many different situations, and perhaps even to me in regard to my phone call. “Walk away.” His counsel as an employer, friend, father, neighbor, human being, is that sometimes we all need to learn to walk away.

The morning I met Hudson he told me he still looks up at the windows of the Ballard Building, where there used to be an office of the Ballard News-Tribune, and he still wants to set the record straight.

Hudson is now legally disabled due to glaucoma, still an excellent storyteller: no matter what’s fact, what’s fiction. I said to him, “As a black male with a knife you are lucky to be alive.” Every week I drive past the intersection where another person of color, Native-American John T. Williams died, and I always think about him and his carving knife. Unlike Hudson, Williams was never even construed to be, “advancing on officers”

So here is what I want to say to you now Mr. Hudson, “As for the Ballard News-Tribune, consider your side of the story now told. You were indeed a fisherman on your way to breakfast, who felt threatened and in turn threatened a dog and its owner with your duct-taped fishing knife. Now walk on past the windows where there used to be an office. Walk away because you still can; make other choices. Let that one go.”