Byron Ragland is a court-appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor. He was overseeing an outing between a mother and her son at a frozen-yogurt shop when two police officers showed up and asked him to move along. (Danny Westneat / The Seattle Times)

He turned out to be supervising a parental visit, and is also a nine-year Air Force veteran. But the employees were scared of him and the police asked him to leave anyway.

By Danny Westneat
Seattle Times columnist

When I play the 911 call for Byron Ragland — the emergency call about him — I study his face. I expect that maybe he’ll get angry.

Instead he looks sad. When it ends, after three minutes, he sits back across the table and his eyes mist up a bit.

“What’s my reaction?” he says, after I ask. “My reaction is that this was just another Wednesday.”

It was a week ago Wednesday when Ragland was sitting in a Kirkland Menchie’s, the frozen-yogurt franchise. Ragland, 31, is both a court-appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor, so his job is to oversee meetings between kids and the parents who have lost custody of them.

That’s what he was doing at the store — he was supervising an outing between a mother and her 12-year-old son. The boy wanted ice cream, so the three drove to Menchie’s, arrived together and had been sitting there for about half an hour, visiting, when Ragland looked up to find two police officers standing at the table.

“They asked me to leave,” Ragland said. “They asked for my ID. They told me the manager had been watching me and wanted me to move along.”

Ragland did “move along,” he says — though that phrase, as if he were a stray dog, made him bristle. The police report reflects that the Kirkland officers were told he was there working. In fact he was legally required to be there overseeing the mother and son.

“Ragland had two associates (female adult and male juvenile) with him, who stated they were there with him for visitation,” the report says. They were asked to leave anyway, and they did.

“Store employees … told me that he had been in the store for a while and did not buy anything, and he was not making them feel comfortable,” says an “unwanted subject” report. The employees “were both thankful that Ragland was gone.”


https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/unwanted-subject-what-led-a-kirkland-yogurt-shop-to-call-police-on-a-black-man/