Man pleads guilty to fatal shooting in Seattle protest zone

SEATTLE (AP) — A man accused in the fatal shooting of a young man in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone in 2020 has pleaded guilty to murder.

Marcel Long, 22, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Thursday in the death of 19-year-old Horace Anderson, The Seattle Times reported.

Anderson was killed June 20, 2020, in an eight-block area of the city where people were protesting the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a police officer.

Charging documents said several people called 911 to report the shooting but responding police were met by an angry crowd and left after someone yelled that the person shot had been taken to Harborview Medical Center. Anderson died at the hospital just over 30 minutes after 911 was called.

A lawsuit filed by Anderson’s father, Horace Anderson, said police and fire department medics refused to respond to the shooting scene as Anderson was dying. The city settled the lawsuit for $500,000 last year.

Long was arrested more than a year after the shooting in a Seattle suburb. Anderson and Long had apparently been at odds since 2019, after they were involved in a fight Anderson lost that was posted on YouTube, court documents said.

Surveillance video of their confrontation in the protest zone shows the two young men exchanging words and Long pulling out a handgun. The video shows Anderson walking away and Long, who had been restrained momentarily by others, raising the gun and shooting Anderson several times.

Long is scheduled to be sentenced on June 30.