As David Edwards prepares to leave Spokane, it’s hard to imagine what the community of the Community Building will be like without the gregarious and giving spirit he brought to its core.

By Tim Connor
The funny thing is they both remember the job interview the exact same way, almost word for word, even though it was eleven years ago.
“Then he said, ‘have you ever worked on a computer?’” David Edwards recalls a couple days later, when asked about the same interview.
“And I said ‘no.’”
It went on from there.
Jim: “Have you ever answered the phone?”
David: “No.”
Jim: “Have you ever been a receptionist?”
David: “No.”
Jim: “Can you start Monday?”
In a picture that’s hard to paint with words, David Edwards then widens his eyes, grins, and makes a move with his head that seems to come right out of his considerable repertoire of basketball moves.
“And I said, ‘What? Hold up, man, something is wrong with this here. I just said no to every question you asked me. And you’re going to hire me?’”
There is, as you might expect, a bit more to the story.
The Center for Justice was then in the Minnesota Building on West First Avenue. But Sheehan soon found a new home for the law firm. The Center would be the anchor tenant of a three-story structure at Main & Browne that, most recently, had been used as a brew-pub.
To house the law firm, a stately public hall, a child care center as well as new office and retail space the building needed an extensive renovation. Sheehan asked Edwards to oversee the job and then to become the Community Building’s superintendent.

“David’s an ambassador. He understands what community is. He understands that love is more powerful than hate, and that peace is more powerful than dysfunction. He understands all that.” –Jim Sheehan

The Community Building’s physical make-over is well-documented and the results plain to the naked eye. But the sum of the experience would not nearly be complete without “Big D,” whose laughter, and banter, and boffo exclamations rip through the place like trumpet music.
It’s that rare spirit that solely explains why Sheehan hired Edwards in 1999 and put so much trust in him.
“He just had great energy,” Sheehan recalls, “and it was perfect for us to find a person like David just at that time. He’d been a truck driver, done a bunch of odd jobs. But it was really more just who he was, rather than what he’d done. That’s why we hired him.”
Edwards was in his early forties back then. If you wonder how a man from Ybor City, Florida (an ethnically diverse, inner-city neighborhood in Tampa, originally populated by immigrants who worked in Tampa’s cigar industry) made his way to Spokane, Big D has a one-word answer: “love.”
The woman who would become the mother of his first two children was visiting Tampa during spring break and was strolling on a beach when the two met. She stayed in Tampa for a year and then told Edwards she wanted to return to Spokane to rendezvous with her mother who was making a visit to Spokane from her home in Korea.
“I didn’t even know where Spokane was,” he recalls. “But I was in love, so I quit my job and got a Greyhound bus ticket and came here.”
David and his young family eventually landed in Bremerton. When his marriage unraveled he found himself back in Spokane, but in the midst of a battle to gain custody of his two young children. He would eventually prevail but not before spending nearly two months in the Spokane County jail for violating a restraining order.
It was, he confesses, the worst time of his life and one day it led him to the Spokane River in east Spokane, near the Union Gospel Mission, with a plan to drown himself.
“I was sitting on the bank,” he says. “I was this close to it. But something just wouldn’t let me jump.”
He started going to church more, and working as many jobs as he could find. Ironically, it was his trouble with the law that allowed him to connect with the woman who eventually reeled him in to work for the Center for Justice. Her name is Gloria Finn Porter and she was David’s public defender. She helped him with his legal problems and helped him get his life back together.
“David’s just an extraordinary person,” Gloria explains when asked about what she saw in David back then. “It doesn’t take long to figure that out.”
Part of what she saw in him was his strength in awaiting a jury verdict on what both of them believed was a false gross misdemeanor charge stemming from the dispute with his wife. She remembers briefing him on how precarious his situation was, and what the system could to do him. In reply, she remembers him thanking her for her work in the courtroom and telling her that whatever happened would be the right thing. He was acquitted in about thirty minutes.

“That was too easy,” David remembers thinking when he heard Gloria Finn Porter’s voice on the phone. “Something has to be wrong.” But this time the news was all good.

In the end, Gloria Finn Porter gave David Edwards another message. If he ever needed something, he should give her a call.
He didn’t call right away. After being reunited with his children, he was off to Florida, to try to make a go of it in Miami. It was a horrible mistake.
He was robbed twice and his house was broken into. Worse, he found himself as a single black man, trying to raise two young children, surrounded by racial tension and violence.
“It wasn’t just between black and white,” he says. “It was a multi-cultural race of hatred. I’d rather be broke living in a tent than live in a place where there’s a lot of hatred.”
He decided to sell everything he owned, including his new golf clubs and Chrysler Park Avenue, and move back to Spokane with his children. They came by Greyhound and when they arrived, David had a mere $119 in his pocket. At first, the three of them lived in a church basement.
Although David had gotten one job-working as a teaching assistant with disabled children-he need to make more money to support his children, Christina who was then ten, and her brother Chris who was a year younger. So he went to a local school that qualifies drivers to drive semi-trucks. Only after completing his exam did he discover that he would be denied his commercial license because his record was marred by a past conviction for driving with a suspended license.
That’s when he remembered the longstanding offer from Gloria Finn Porter. He called her, and in short order, after a court hearing–in which an empathetic local judge fined him only a dollar—his record was cleared and the path opened for the new job.
Two days later his phone rang.
“That was too easy,” he remembered thinking when he heard Finn Porter’s voice on the other end of the phone. “Something has to be wrong.”
He thought there was a catch, that his record wouldn’t be cleared after all.
But that’s not why she’d called. Instead, she was calling to invite him to what became that comically short job interview at the Center for Justice, the one that changed his life, and many others.
Understandably, there’s a special place in David Edwards’s heart for Gloria Finn Porter and Jim Sheehan.

“And I said, ‘What? Hold up, man, something is wrong with this here. I just said no to every question you asked me. And you’re going to hire me?”

“Jim has been wonderful to me,” Edwards says. “He gave me an opportunity, plus he gave me an opportunity to be myself. Like Jim don’t even know what I do,” and here he breaks into a hearty laugh. “That’s how great an opportunity he gave me. But he had confidence that I would always do the right thing. And, like, I have. I’ve always tried to do the right thing, and have always tried to include other people in things that I do, to benefit other people. I try to take one person, to benefit this person, so we can benefit that person, and we make it one big beneficial area. You know what I’m saying? So I
guess he saw something in me, that I didn’t even see in myself.”
For a decade, the visible and audible part of his daily routine started shortly before 9 a.m. when he arrived on the block. Starting up on the third floor, he would greet everyone he could find in the building before settling into his office on the mezzanine level. Then he would check in with the work crew that he affectionately calls “his kids,” which include his son, Christopher, and several other teens paid to help with the maintenance chores.
This is where the part of David Edwards that was given a remarkable professional opportunity a decade ago meets the part of him who is a missionary. Just beneath the geyser of laughter, the practical jokes, and southern-fried patois is a devoutly religious person who is earnestly committed to helping the poor, and ferociously committed to helping young people at risk for failure.

“I say, look. All the skills I have, when I’m dead and gone, they all go with me. So while I’m able to give back, I want to give back. But I want to give back to drop outs, children who have re-offended, the kids that are getting left behind. Because when they drop out, guess what they get? A cell phone and a sack. And that sack ain’t a sack of paper, it’s a sack of dope. Because now there’s no alternative for them. They’ve done failed in school. Who’s going to hire them with no high school diploma? And if they get caught and convicted of a felony, then they’re really screwed. We have a real epidemic right here in our backyard that nobody’s even looking at.”

Says David: “What I instill in them is working back with their bodies. Like physical work. Oh, you can keep texting, but not on the job.”
At the end of his days at the Community Building, David Edwards would always go visit the child care center on the ground floor, and share his inner child with the children.
Sheehan praises him for his work with young people which, for several years, has also involved his leadership and coaching in the summer soccer camp that the Community Building runs each summer for school children.
“David’s an ambassador,” Sheehan says. “He understands what community is. He understands that love is more powerful than hate, and that peace is more powerful than dysfunction. He understands all that.”
Part of being an ambassador has been his compassion for the homeless, many of whom were camped on the block in the days when the Community Building was being renovated.
“The old House of Charity had just closed nearby,” Sheehan explains, “and the new one hadn’t opened yet. So we had a lot of guys who had been coming to the House of Charity who wound up here, in fact one of them lived for a while under the stairs where the child care center is now. David was able to deal with all that and because of his attitude and the way he is, others in the building, myself included, were also able to deal with things
in a much better way.”
Periodically, Edwards and Community Building operations manager Warren Bazile have taken the lead in organizing free hot breakfasts. Hundreds of homeless are served each year in the building’s main hall. That’s what people see. What they don’t see, and which Edwards doesn’t make a habit of talking about, are his regular trips to bring blankets, food and drinks to homeless people in the downtown area.
He thinks of it as his own quiet ministry, and one that takes him into the streets.

“I don’t beat people over the head with the Bible,” David says. “It comes straight from my heart. It starts in your shoes. I wonder what it’s like to be in your shoes.”

By his own admission, this past year, 2o1o, has been one of the hardest to be in his own shoes.
It started on Martin Luther King Day, January 18th. It was a cold but beautifully blue winter day. He got up, made breakfast for his two sons, and headed downtown for the MLK ceremony and the march from the convention center to River Park Square.
Afterwards, he drove in his 2oo5 Cadillac to the Chief Garry neighborhood to inspect a used car that had been advertised for sale. He was examining the car in the seller’s yard when the two of them noticed SPD police cruisers and figured the police were checking out a drug house.
Depending on whom you choose to believe, Edwards was either stopped for failing to signal for a left turn, or he was stopped because he was a black man driving a Cadillac.
Edwards was humiliated and outraged and although the outrage lingered, he was also committed to making what happened to him an object lesson on what is like to be black in Spokane. He enlisted attorney Breean Beggs to represent him and worked with community organizers to strengthen independent of the city’s police force.

“When they [the police] did that,” David says, stopping in mid-sentence to deeply exhale, “that took me away from where I was. My body had just never shut down like that, instantly. I have never been that upset with a person. I was in uncharted territory. I was really angry and I was thinking of revenge. But then I had to think–revenge doesn’t belong to me. I have somebody who takes care of that for me. So, I had to dig even deeper then because, as I say, I would continue to see police around town.”

On the evening of May 24th Edwards arrived at city Hall wearing a black cap with the city’s telephone area code “5o9” embroidered above the bill. He was nervous, but when his name was called to testify he stood at the podium in front of the all-white council and delivered not just an account of his traffic stop, but a heartfelt explanation of what it was like to be a black man in Spokane. He was electrically funny at times, as you’d expect of Big D, but the overall effect was deeply powerful, not just because of what he said, but because of who he is.
“Mister Edwards testimony, in particular, really reaches me,” Snyder said later that night from the council dais, “because I’ve known him for a while, and trusted him with the safety of my children. He taught my son soccer. I’ve known him for a number of years and the humiliation what he experienced and related tonight is unconscionable and I feel deeply for him, for having to reveal that in a public setting.”
Maybe the changes to the city’s police oversight ordinance would have occurred without Edwards’s riveting testimony. It’s hard to say. But it’s clear that the incident on Martin Luther King Day left him deeply shaken, and that his willingness to talk openly about its effect on him—as a law-abiding black man who gives so much back to his community—continues to shape both the debate over how Spokane police should be held accountable, and larger questions about how far the city has still to go to make the David Edwardses of the world feel safe raising their children here.
“That’s a huge factor in why I’m leaving,” Edwards says about the chill and linger fears from what happened to him last January. “When I’m here, when I drive my car, I don’t feel free. I feel all this recent police killing, killing here, killing there, I am really scared for my life in this town. That was hard on me. It took a lot out of me, and it took me a long time to recover from that. When I finally recovered, then I got hurt.”
His injury came at work. Not long after his appearance before the city council in May, a gust of wind toppled a tall ladder being used to water hanging plants on the north face of the Community Building. The falling ladder struck him hard and sent him to the ground. His shoulder and back were badly injured and he couldn’t work for several weeks. He remembers gamely trying to do soccer camp but stopped because even the kids became upset when they noticed how much pain he was in.
There were other things happening that didn’t sit well with him. As winter arrived, he said, he felt like he was at a standstill in his life.
“That’s not me,” he said, explaining his decision to leave Spokane and move to the Seattle area, where his daughter lives.
Word that he planned to leave town was greeted on the block and in the building with gasps of disbelief. It’s hard to think about what the Community Building will be like without Big D’s soulful presence because he’s been a part of it from day one.
On December 16th the main hall at the building was filled at the end of the day with well-wishers who followed Jim Sheehan to the microphone to share their stories and affection for David. He was presented with the annual Community Building “Community Award” for his work and spirit and he fought back tears as one person after another embraced him.
He says he knows what he wants to do when he gets to the west side. He says he sees himself working for King County, helping troubled young people turn their lives around.
“My work here, I feel, is done,” he says even though he’s quick to add he’ll be back in Spokane for Hoopfest and to coach at summer soccer camp.
“It’s time for me to move on. I want to see something different. My mission in going to Seattle is saving souls, children’s souls. That’s all that’s on my mind.”