Thank you all for signing this petition in support of Michael Layton Taylor and particularly to his family, who I know are still grieving the loss of Michael. I wanted to check in with everyone, as it is the one-month mark since the creation of this petition, and Michael's story is still very much on my mind. I heard Michael's father on KUOW the other day, and I am so upset that the police have still offered him nothing to clarify what actually transpired that led them to use deadly force. When I first read about what happened, I felt as though I were reading about myself. Like Michael, I am an Asian adoptee. Like Michael, I was adopted by a white father and Japanese mother. Like Michael, I lost my adoptive mother to illness as a young man, which changed the course of my life, and I was also very close to my paternal grandmother whose passing several years ago was profoundly heartbreaking. Like Michael, I've struggled with addiction and financial insecurity for the greater part of my adult life. I have never been homeless, but there were years when I was terrified of becoming so, as my income was such that I often barely made rent even while on food assistance. Like Michael, I also have had learning difficulties that have deprived me of many opportunties in life and caused a great deal of emotional distress and vulnerability. Like Michael, my name is 'Michael' and my middle initial is 'L'. I say all this to underscore why I called out Michael's status as an adoptee in this petition. The particular twists and turns, the losses and traumas that checkered his life — I believe they are all common themes in many adoptees' lives, even more so for transracial adoptees. My hope is that one day statistics will be better available that show the rates of developmental delays, homelessness, addiction, mental health problems, and incarceration among the adoptee population. There seems to be plenty of anecdotal evidence from social workers and mental health clinicians that there are strong correlations and also that conventional solutions in these areas do not address the unique needs of adoptees. This is admittedly a whole other discussion to be had, but it felt appropriate here to explain exactly why Michael's "adoptee" status was mentioned in the petition title. While the petition signatures have slowed down, I urge all of you to keep sharing it and to do whatever you can to keep these issues on Seattle's and the entire country's radar. Yes, our Mayor and City Council clearly have an entire new set of problems now, as a person who has spent the last year-and-a-half engaging in dog whistle rhetoric that threatens the safety of people of color and decries police accountability has now taken the White House. However, that is even more reason to remind our municipal leaders to not forget their commitment to protect our most vulnerable citizens and to stop criminalizing poverty, addiction, and mental illness. Truthfully, throughout this Presidential race, there was almost no mention of our nation's homelessness problem, despite many major cities (including Seattle) and the State of Hawaii having declared their homelessness situations a State of Emergency. We cannot let the federal government's dysfunctions distract us completely from those within our own local government, and we cannot allow homelessness to get lost in the noise that is likely to dominate the news for the next four years. The homeless — including the immigrants among them, the POCs among them, the women among them, the LGBT people among them, and the adoptees among them — they will be the first to suffer, perhaps mortally, if we do not fight for their right to exist in the eyes of our public policy makers. Michael may not have been homeless at the time of his passing, but he was certainly a casualty of our local government's inhumane and punitive relationship to homelessness. Please keep him in your minds and hearts. We need to keep remembering stories like his in order to make sure the system that failed him does not continue to fail others. Thank you.