Last night the music died

An e-mail last night from my old friend Arthur Hayashi in Spokane with the subject line “Horrible News.”

That was putting it mildly. The story was in the Spokane Spokesman-Review this morning:

Former Spokane music educator stabbed to death

January 4, 2008


"Mark Williams, who for years was a fixture in the Spokane music scene, was stabbed to death Wednesday, and his son has been arrested in connection with the crime, the Bellingham Herald is reporting.

Mark Williams’ wife was hospitalized after the attack, in which she was stabbed in the chest, the Herald reports. She was reported in satisfactory condition this morning.

Williams, who was 52, taught elementary band for Spokane Public Schools and was the former director of the Spokane British Brass Band. Acquaintances say the couple moved to Bellingham within the past year.

According to the Herald, 24-year-old Brian Williams has been arrested on investigation of second-degree murder and first-degree assault. Investigators allege that he attacked his father and mother about 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Police say an argument may have begun when Brian Williams was woken up by his father to take medications, the Herald reports.

Connie Williams told investigators that she tried to break up a fight between her husband and son. She said she wrestled one knife away from him, but he grabbed another, the Herald reports.


A neighbor called 911 after hearing a commotion.

Mark Williams graduated from Shadle Park High School and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Eastern Washington University, according to the Spokane British Brass Band Web page. He had performed with the Spokane Symphony, Spokane Civic Theatre, Spokane Jazz Society and the 560th Air Force Band, and composed and arranged music for school bands and orchestras.

He was a member of the Spokane British Brass Band from its inception."



Arthur, Mark and I attended Jonas Salk Junior High School in Spokane together when we were all barely in our teens. Mark was already a musician then. He played clarinet in the school band. He had a particular fondness for Soviet composers, particularly Khatchaturian and Shostakovich. I first heard Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony sitting with Mark in a listening booth at the Spokane Public Library, around 1970. We were both 14 at the time. (Mark liked the piece, in fact it remained a favorite of his all his life. But he warned me that spring day that its Largo movement was "the most boring thing you ever sat through.")

I re-established contact with both Mark and Arthur when I moved back to Spokane to operate a bed-and-breakfast in 2006. Arthur, a family-law attorney, was president of the Spokane County Bar Association. Mark was arranging music for school bands and touring on behalf of his music publisher. He was on the road a lot. But every six weeks or so I would organize the "three [gray] musketeers" for lunch at some local eatery or other.


When I last saw Mark, late last April at O’Doherty’s Irish Grille in Spokane, he told Arthur and me that he was thinking of moving to Bellingham because he was about to become a grandfather and wanted to be “near the grandbaby.” At 52, he was the first of our crowd to become a grandfather. His wife Connie, he said, was looking for a teaching job which might facilitate their move from Spokane to Bellingham. I kept in touch with him sporadically after our move to D.C., but was unaware that he had gone ahead and made the move over to western Washington state, with which he was familiar because of course he had attended the University of Washington and lived for a while in Seattle. So he’s in Bellingham for a couple of months, being near the grandbaby, and then gets stabbed to death by his unstable son, whom we already knew had problems.

Here’s the irony: Mark’s family meant so much to him that he eschewed a larger career in music than teaching elementary school band and writing and arranging music for school bands so he could devote most of his time and energy to raising his kids. He told me that the satisfactions of home life and parenthood more than made up for his not having reached for the gold ring and tried to become a symphony conductor or something else grander than a music teacher. And what does he get for it? Stabbed in the chest several times by his son, whom he told me in 2006, when we first met up again after not having seen each other in more than 35 years, had been diagnosed as bipolar.

I’ve seen friends die. This is the first time I’ve had one murdered. And no one deserved it less.