Story Published:
Feb 6, 2006 at 8:05 AM PDT
Story Updated:
Aug 31, 2006 at 2:12 AM PDT
TACOMA - A Pierce County Superior Court judge
startled prosecutors, sheriff's deputies and spectators by leading
a Super Bowl cheer for the Seattle Seahawks before a sentencing
hearing in a manslaughter case.
After all were told to rise as Judge Beverly G. Grant took the
bench Friday, she asked everyone in court to say, "Go Seahawks"
before taking their seats. Dissatisfied with the low volume of the
response, she repeated the request.
Only then did she hear statements from prosecutors, defense
lawyers and relatives of the slain Tino Patricelli, as well as an
apology from Steve Keo Teang, before resentencing him to 13½ years
in prison.
"The tension was very high, and I thought it would be a way of
people just thinking of something else and releasing it," Grant
said afterward. "It was a diversion tactic to bring unison in the
group."
Teang, 24, of Federal Way, who pleaded guilty to first-degree
manslaughter, was sentenced in January to 16 years and four months,
but Grant reconsidered after his relatives complained that they
were unable to attend for lack of space in the small courtroom.
On Friday, in a larger courtroom, she also changed her mind on
the sentence and accepted the joint recommendation of prosecutors
and defense lawyers for a lesser prison term.
Courtroom personnel were embarrassed by the Seahawks cheer,
sheriff's Detective Ed Troyer and deputy prosecutor Sunni Y. Ko
said.
"It's the most important day almost in their lives, for both
families," Ko said. "One family is seeing a son go off to prison,
and one family is here to find justice for their loved one who was
murdered. It's important to them. Do you think they want to root
for the Seahawks?"
Kathy Patricelli, stepmother of the 28-year-old Renton man who
was fatally shot in a fight outside a tavern in Milton, said she
didn't join in the Seahawks cheers.
"Super Bowl Sunday is Tino's one-year anniversary of the day he
was murdered," Patricelli said. "I was a little tiny bit offended
- well, a lot offended - because this was kind of an important day
for us. Cheering for the Seahawks with Steve Teang in the room, I
didn't think it was appropriate."
Grant said she hadn't meant to offend anyone.
"If the prosecutor and the others took it that way, as far as
I'm concerned, it's trite," the judge said. "The germane issue
was to focus on the reason we had to come back in the first place -
public access to courts."
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