by Carolyn Bick

The Emerald’s Watchdragon reporting seeks to increase accountability within our city’s institutions through in-depth investigative journalism.

Content Warning: This story and the tweets linked within contain strong language and fairly graphic descriptions of violence towards protesters. Some of the tweets themselves also contain the apparent celebration of murder.

“Do you have the go fund me for #FreeDawitkelete?” a tweet from @1SteelerFanatic asks. The person behind the account posted the tweet last July in response to a GoFundMe page for Black Lives Matter protester Summer Taylor, who was alive when the GoFundMe page was created. By the time the tweet asking about a fundraiser for Dawit Kelete — the man who severely injured Taylor and another protester, Diaz Love, by hitting them both with a car last summer — had been posted, Taylor was dead. The same person behind the account would go on to use the #FreeDawitkelete hashtag in several other posts.

“Haha he even admits he was trying to be an annoying fuck by verbally harassing the cops and staff.  He deserves every bit of those missing teeth. Hope he learned to STFU,” a more recent tweet from @1SteelerFanatic reads. It was in response to this story about a video the Emerald obtained that appeared to show King County correctional officers who, according to jail video, appeared to have slammed a young man’s face into a pre-booking counter at the King County Correctional Facility (KCCF) last summer.

“Naw, rest in piss bitch,” still another tweet from @1SteelerFanatic reads. This one was in response to a Portland, Oregon, mother asking black bloc members to show up for a rally in memory of her dead son. Posted on Oct. 7, 2021, it was one of the last tweets @1SteelerFanatic — using the display name “Bruce Wayne” — would make before an Oct. 8 thread surfaced alleging that the person behind the account is Seattle Police Department (SPD) officer Andrei Constantin, taking on a life of its own and eventually garnering thousands of likes and hundreds of retweets.

Less than an hour after the thread had been posted, the @1SteelerFanatic account was deactivated — but not before the account and its tweets had been archived in various ways, including in Archive Today, the Wayback Machine, and in screenshots shared on Twitter. The account is littered with tweets that mock the dead, promote extreme violence against protesters, suggest that people should arm themselves to shoot protesters, and suggest that the murder of George Floyd was “justice” (and later mock the way Floyd was murdered, as well). One tweet even claims that “fake vets” (veterans) showed up to decry police brutality and violence, while another celebrates the police shooting death of a robbery suspect.