Spokane Boxing Gym owner Rick Welliver attacked by group in Peaceful Valley

Spokane Boxing Gym owner Rick Welliver was left unconscious after a brutal attack in broad daylight by a group of men in the city’s Peaceful Valley Neighborhood on Sunday afternoon, police confirmed Tuesday.

Welliver recounted the attack in an interview at his gym Tuesday, saying he wanted to get the story out so his attackers could be brought to justice. He was taking his daily walk on the Peaceful Valley stairs near West Riverside Avenue and South Cedar Street, he said, when a group of four or five young men standing on a landing between sets of stairs blocked his way and asked to borrow his phone.

“The next thing I heard was kind of a crack, and I fell down the landing to the next level,” he said. “I was getting stomped and stepped on. Luckily, I kind of turtled up and protected my face.”

A passerby found him on the ground and called for help from the nearby fire station, Welliver said, praising the swift response by paramedics who rushed him to Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. Wearing sunglasses to relieve a headache, Welliver said he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and a subdural hematoma, a type of potentially life-threatening bleeding near the brain.

Officer Tricia Leming, a Spokane Police Department spokeswoman, said police were called about 1:45 p.m. Sunday to Cedar Street and West Riverside Avenue. No arrests had been made as of midday Tuesday, she said, and the department was still working to identify an unspecified number of suspects.

His memory of the attack is unclear, Welliver said Tuesday, but in a post on Facebook a day earlier, he wrote that he was struck in the head with a tire iron. The attack left him with a gash in the back of his head – now stapled shut – a dislocated left ankle and extensive bruising. 

After sharing his story with The Spokesman-Review and local TV stations, Welliver walked out of his gym with a single crutch to a truck driven by a friend who pleaded with him to go home and rest. The former professional boxer, who retired in 2005, said that while he’s used to getting hit, “I’m not accustomed to inhumane acts.”

“I didn’t deserve that,” he said, suddenly choked up with tears in his eyes.

“It was just – it sucked,” he added, connecting the young men who attacked him to the youths whose lives he strives to improve as a coach and mentor. “You know, I work with kids in this gym. I wish I could have met them sooner.”

As Welliver told his story, one of his young students stopped by to check on him. The coach put his arm around the boy, then bent down to show the 15 staples in the back of his head.

“Keep showing up to the gym even if I’m not here, all right?” Welliver said to the boy, who promised he would.

Chris Loux, a manager at nearby First Avenue Coffee, said Welliver came into the shop soon after being discharged from the hospital on Monday. Loux was devastated to see his friend, a regular at the cafe, clearly in both physical and emotional pain.

“I was just horrified,” Loux said. “Why would somebody do this? That’s something that we’re all thinking, but I could see it in his face, too.”

Loux said he has joked about Welliver being an unpaid staff member and “one of our key pieces of furniture” at the coffee shop, where he often buys coffee for friends and strangers alike.

“He’s just always been a very generous and gentle heart in the time I’ve known him,” Loux said. “It just makes it all the more upsetting to see that something like that would happen to him, of all people.” 

The assault renewed concerns among locals about safety in the neighborhood. Jordan Tampien, an entrepreneur and co-founder of nearby Brick West Brewing, wrote Monday on Facebook that Welliver had “spent years building this city up.”

“He shows up for Spokane, and Spokane needs to show up for him. I’m grateful he’s alive, but ‘at least he survived’ can’t be the standard for walking through our own neighborhoods,” Tampien wrote. “I build and invest in downtown Spokane because I believe in it. But belief isn’t a plan. The stairs, the trails, and the paths that connect our neighborhoods to downtown should be places families can use without thinking twice. Right now too many people don’t feel that way, and yesterday shows why.”

Bryn Garrehy, vice chair of the Peaceful Valley Neighborhood Council, called the assault “very unfortunate and predictable, due to the utterly blighted nature of the stairs and surrounding areas that reach to the Maple Street Bridge.”

“As a community, Peaceful Valley suffers directly and continuously from this decay, while we search and strive for solutions,” Garrehy, founder of Peaceful Valley Coffee, wrote in an email. “There are many children and vulnerable houses directly at the feet of this mess.”