SEATTLE – The future once seemed very bright for Naveed Afzal Haq, the son of a Pakistan-born civil structural engineer at the Hanford nuclear complex in Washington state.
Bound for a prestigious bio-dentistry program in Philadelphia, Haq had a huge smile on his face in his 1994 senior yearbook photo at Richland High School in south-central Washington. “RHS, Peace Be Unto You,” were his parting words to classmates.
It was Haq, now 30 and facing trial in his hometown on a lewd-conduct charge, who allegedly came to Seattle on Friday and used two semiautomatic handguns to unload a barrage of gunfire inside the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.
To force his way in, he took a 13-year-old girl hostage at gunpoint, police and witnesses said Saturday.
Haq shouted several comments about his anger toward Jews, toward Israel and its war in Lebanon, and toward American policy in Iraq. One woman, Pam Waechter, 58, the federation’s assistant director, was killed, and five other women were injured.
One of his shooting victims, Dayna Klein, 37, was credited by police with helping bring the attack to an end.
Police said that about a half-hour before the shooting, Haq had been stopped on a minor traffic violation for driving down a bus-only lane but had done nothing to arouse an officer’s suspicion and had been let go.
Those who knew Haq best described him Saturday as a drifting, sad and mentally troubled figure who was a source of worry and embarrassment for his parents, but not anybody’s idea of a political or religious zealot inclined toward violence.
He had washed out of the dentistry program after a few years, and landed back in Richland, unfocused, unlucky in love and eventually unstable. In March, prosecutors said, he climbed on top of a fountain near the Macy’s in a Richland area mall, unzipped his pants and started exposing himself to women.
Haq was due to go to trial Thursday on the exposure charge, but the trial date had been postponed.
Law-enforcement authorities, Haq’s friends and his parents’ friends all said Saturday that Haq’s inner motivations remained a mystery. At least some raised the possibility that he may have sought to cloak an animus toward women – all his victims were female – by acting as a self-appointed warrior against Israel or against Jews.
But whatever his reasons, Haq had virtually no known history as a politically active figure, and his religious practice as a Muslim was described by friends as dutiful and at times dormant, not fanatic.
And those closest to him said Saturday that they thought he was troubled, not violent.
“Yes, Naveed was drifting, he was lost, but this alleged crime is a shock beyond belief to all of us,” said Muhammad Kaleem Ullah, vice president of the Tri-Cities Islamic Center, a focus of religious and community life for several hundred Muslims who live in Richland, Pasco and Kennewick.
“Never did we think of Naveed as violent,” said Ullah, a friend of his parents who has known Haq since he was 9 years old. “If you had told me he was on the moon, I could not be more shocked.”
Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowse said at a news conference Saturday that Haq had gained entry to the federation by hiding behind a plant in the lobby of the building, then placing a gun to the head of the 13-year-old girl who happened to be passing by.
The suspect brought two semiautomatic handguns, plus extra ammunition, into the building, which is next to a Starbucks in the Belltown area at the edge of downtown.
The girl he had taken hostage was released as soon as he gained access to the federation offices and was not otherwise injured.
“Once inside, he immediately started firing at people,” Kerlikowske said.
At Harborview Medical Center, officials said that three women critically injured in the gunfire had all been upgraded to serious as of Saturday. The three are Layla Bush, 23, of Seattle; Christina Rexroad, 29, of Everett; and Cheryl Stumbo, 43, of Seattle. The two other victims, Klein and Carol Goldman, 35, both of Seattle, are in satisfactory condition.
About 10 others in the offices at the time of the attack escaped injury.
At his news conference, the police chief singled out Klein, who is pregnant, as a hero in the encounter. He said she was shot in the arm, after instinctively using it to protect her womb.
After falling to the floor, she managed to crawl back to her office and dial 911, Kerlikowske said. Haq, he said, told her “not to do that. But she continued to tell the 911 operators what was happening.”
Haq said he “wanted the U.S. to leave Iraq, that his people had been mistreated, the U.S. was arming Israel, and he didn’t care if he died,” the chief said.
The official police report, released Saturday and based on interviews with witnesses in the office and the transcript of the 911 call, quoted him as saying: “I’m not upset at you people, I’m upset at your foreign policy. These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.”
Then he repeated his name and gave his Social Security number, adding: “I just want us to get out of Iraq. I’m an American too, but I want our people out of Iraq.”
Kerlikowske said the guns were legally purchased by Haq at two different gun shops, and that he picked them up Thursday, one day before the shooting, after a required three-day waiting period. He said authorities believed Haq had used the Internet to target a Jewish-related group in the Seattle area.
Klein and the 911 dispatchers, speaking jointly to Haq, managed to calm him down and get him to stop shooting. After a few minutes, he blurted out: “I’ll give myself up.”
Responding to a dispatcher’s question, he said he was “wearing a green shirt, blue pants, I’m in jeans,” the police report said.
“I’ll put my gun down,” he continued. “She says my gun is down.”
Asked by a dispatcher whom the “she” was, Haq said it was the pregnant Klein, “the woman I just shot.”
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