About three months ago, I stood outside a tent a few blocks off Aurora Avenue in North Seattle. Inside was a 9-year-old boy. His mother was a fentanyl addict working as a prostitute on Aurora. She made him wait in the bushes while men came to the tent.
The neighbors had been calling CPS and SPD for months. The caseworkers and the cops told me the same thing: their hands were tied. The law required imminent physical harm before anyone could remove him. They couldn’t have missed all the fentanyl foil squares next to the rat feces and bottles of urine in the tent.
We later found out the mother was smoking fentanyl inside the tent while her son was in there with her…