Looking back on it, I realize now that these elements were a recipe for disaster from the beginning. Why couldn't we just relax and appreciate all the work we had already accomplished for the day? Or go out and do something fun together? I don't think we really even knew how to have fun. We were too busy being concerned about saving all the animals in the world. There was no time for fun and games.
We started talking about the different campaigns and how we could do something at night with them and one came to our minds almost simultaneously. The SHAC campaign stands for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (http://www.shac.net/) and they're a group of people who shed light on an animal testing company called Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS).
HLS tests on and kills many different animals. Bunnies, guinea pigs, primates, puppies. If it is cute and cuddly, they are destroying it. Specifically, it is common knowledge, even to this day, that they take 500 puppies EVERY DAY and do things like drop chemicals into their eyes and slice their skin open then rub chemicals in the wounds to see how this affects their biological systems. Then after the results are recorded, the puppies are all killed! Its not like they could retire or live a normal life after being subjected to such torture.
This of course infuriated us and the more we talked about it, the more we wanted to stop it. But HOW? Well, SHAC was a group known for getting results with finding ways to attack not just the company itself, but also its investors. Since HLS was based in the UK, we wouldn't be able to go there ourselves, but we knew of a company in Seattle who had a prominent HLS investor on its board of directors. PERFECT!
Next, we decided that we would send a bunch of black faxes to the company in Seattle to send our message. A black fax is a black sheet of paper that is intended to create an annoyance. If plenty of pages are sent, the toner on the recipient's fax machine will run out. We wanted to let them know that it was for the animals and not some random person, so right in the middle of the black page, we would type a message in small white font that would say something like, "Stop supporting puppy killers," or something like that. You get the idea.
"Wait, I don't want to send them from my apartment," I said. "We should go somewhere else so they can't trace the line to me."
I'm not a technology expert myself, but I guess since it was going to a physical fax/phone line, we couldn't just use Wi-Fi. We had to create a black fax on a lap top and find a physical line on our end to hook the laptop up to in order to send our faxes. Of course, its probably different by now. After all, that was 2002. Ages ago technologically speaking.
It was getting so late that some people went home. The three of us that were left got in the car and were off to find a random phone line. We drove around for awhile until we ended up in Tukwila. At this point it was probably 1 or 2 am, October 17. We saw a quaint little business with a phone line easily accessible from the ground. The plan was for one of us to hook the laptop up to the phone line and start sending as the other two would watch for anyone coming. I grabbed a walkie-talkie and went around the corner while my boyfriend at the time hooked the laptop up to the phone line. The other guy took off in another direction with his radio.
I hadn't been standing there for more than a minute or so when my damn radio went DEAD! I hurried back to the car that was pulled up alongside my boyfriend who was dressed in all black, hunched over the laptop in his own world. Who knows where the other guy went and if his radio was still working or not. All I knew was that our operation was quickly unraveling and we were sitting ducks without working radios.
I told him my status and I got in the car to put my radio on the charger and find a new one as he continued working. I bent down and rummaged through the mess on the floor, but for the life of me couldn't to find a new walkie-talkie. I got a funny feeling that I should call the whole thing off. I sat up and looked to my left and who did I see? Yep! The police!
They rolled up right next to the car and looked right at me. I looked to my right and saw that my boyfriend had already been thrown on the ground. Pinned down with his face in the pavement. Before I knew it, I had a gun pointed at my head with an officer yelling,
"GET OUT OF THE CAR WITH YOUR HANDS UP. KEEP 'EM WHERE I CAN SEE 'EM!"
All I wanted to do was go home and crawl into bed with my cats and wake myself up to realize this was all a dream, but I couldn't. There was no escape. I got out of the car, was cuffed, patted down and thrown in the back of a cop car. There was a lot of confusion as to why we were there. The cops assumed we were robbing the place so they told me I was under arrest for robbery.
"PLEASE! I wasn't robbing the place. You have to believe me! I wouldn't do something like that!" I pleaded.
Just like that, my boyfriend and I were off to jail in separate cars for who knows how long. And who knows where the other guy went? I was never so scared in my life when the background checks were happening on the police computers on the way to jail. My boyfriend came up as a terrorist of sorts for interfering with animal enterprise. The cops started asking me questions and what started out as an attempt to take action to save the animals was quickly turning into felony charges and a long jail sentence. I didn't answer their questions. All I could do was demand to speak to a lawyer.
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