If you think you understand the loss felt by his communities when organizer Elijah Lewis was shot to death in a Capitol Hill road rage incident this April, the devastation and loss for the city runs even deeper.

USA Today columnist Suzette Hackney has explored that terrible loss in a new report on the murder that ties together love and remembrances from friends and family with Lewis’s work in the community and the arts as well as his advocacy and spirit as he worked with groups including Africatown and helped found Sankofa Theater.

His friends believed he could have been the next MLK. A bullet took his life, the headline reads.

“I compare Elijah with the greats,” his sister Quincy will tell me later. “To know Malcolm X’s work was to know him; to know Martin Luther King Jr.’s work was to know him. To know their work and how they showed up daily is to know them. Elijah was genuinely that person. To know my brother’s work was to know him.”

“Come to Seattle to look for Elijah Lee Lewis, and you’ll find him in a dozen different places. His hand was in everything. He was everywhere. His efforts will not be forgotten,” the story concludes.

As for justice, CHS reported here in April on the not guilty plea entered in defense of the scooter rider who shot Lewis, Patrick Cooney. Cooney, 35 and a Yesler Terrace area resident, is charged with second degree murder and first degree assault. He remains jailed on $2 million bail as the legal process winds its way to trial.

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