Partners in Crime: A Murderer and a Rapist Were Trusted with Millions in King County Youth Safety Funds. They stole it.
A convicted child murderer directed grant disbursals for youth services to a rapist. The county viewed these men as "credible messengers" ideally suited for handling vast sums of money meant for kids.
KING COUNTY — Decades before they were partners in a taxpayer-funded kickback scheme, Willard Jimerson and David Heppard were neighbors in a different sort of institution: the McNeil Island Corrections Center. Both men had entered the prison system as teenagers for violent crimes that shocked the region. By 2020, however, they had reinvented themselves as “credible messengers”—mentors with lived experience hired to steer at-risk youth away from gun violence.
King County embraces redemption stories, of course, so placing Jimerson — convicted of murdering a 14 year old girl — in a role overseeing grants for the Regional Peacekeepers Collective, a high-profile youth violence prevention fund, was an on brand decision for the county in the post-2020 landscape. At the time, voters were shoveling money out of their checking accounts and into public coffers at an unprecedented rate.
In King County, publicly-initiated Youth and Family Support Services levies approved self taxation to the tune of almost two billions dollars over six years, beginning with 2021’s Prop. 1 which launched the county’s Best Start for Kids funding mechanism. At the time of its passage, this measure was estimated to generate $872 million in just six years.1 Elected officials, always eyeing polls and term horizons, did not want that money collecting dust. They wanted it out the door.
And so the rush to distribute the first tranche of what would become almost two billion dollars in public largesse began. The criminality and nihilistic community self-cannibalization that occurred next is hard to fathom.
