San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Speaking out after acquittal in Ghost Ship
There were plenty of reasons for Max Harris to leave Oakland.
But haunting memories from the Ghost Ship fire, and from more than two years in lockup facing charges in 36 deaths, weren’t what drove him away. After walking free in September, the fulltime artist faced the same problem he had before the disaster: the high cost of living.
“I didn’t move away because of any hard feelings,” Harris told The Chronicle in a series of phone interviews from his home in Portland, Ore., where he now lives with his partner. “It was virtually impossible to find anywhere to live in the Bay Area.”
Speaking publicly for the first time since a jury acquitted him of three dozen counts of involuntary manslaughter — one for each person who
died in the Dec. 2, 2016, fire during a crowded concert — Harris, 30, said his new life is in some ways dictated by the same housing crisis that helped create the Ghost Ship warehouse.
The region’s extreme housing shortage and high costs pushed a collective of Oakland artists and musicians to the edge of poverty. Without creating nontraditional living spaces like the Ghost Ship, where tenants paid rent as low as a few hundred dollars a month, many said they would have been homeless.
Harris maintains that it was the city of Oakland’s apathy and inaction that led to the deadly blaze, not the actions of two artists who took the blame. The charges forced him to mourn seven friends who died in the fire and the loss of his home, while fighting for his own freedom. Had he been convicted, Harris faced a sentence of up to 39 years in prison.
“I never for a moment doubted myself,” he said, when asked whether he expected an acquittal. “Now, as far as fairness of the judicial process? No. I was not anticipating fairness in the trial, any step of the way.”
But Harris expressed pain and empathy for the families of those who died, something he said he could not do during four days of testimony. He said he wanted the opportunity to address those family members — many of whom wanted to see him sent to prison.
“The one thing I wasn’t able to say is that I love you, I’m sorry, and my heart hurts,” Harris said. “That’s not something I was able to say.”
Harris spent 819 days in jail along with Ghost Ship codefendant Derick Almena, 49, the warehouse’s master tenant, who remains behind bars. The same jury that found Harris not guilty deadlocked on a verdict for Almena, who will face another trial this spring.
Described as Ghost Ship’s creative director and Almena’s righthand man, Harris declined to discuss his friend’s legal case, but called it a “complete and total travesty” that Almena is still behind bars.
At times, Harris is able to see a silver lining from his time in jail, which he treated like an artist’s residency. Watercolors he’s now framing were created behind bars, using toothbrushes, powdered punch for ink and legal paperwork for canvas. Some were branded with “CONFIDENTIAL” or “EXHIBIT L” in the corner.
“It was in some ways an extreme luxury to have a roof over my head and albeit a very meager sustenance, and not have to be working on commercially consumable art,” Harris said. “I love jewelry, I love tattooing, and I love selling paintings, but when you can take money out of the equation, you can go a lot deeper.”
And yet, the tragedy lingers in nearly every aspect of his life, which hasn’t gotten much easier since his release.
“I’m still on the brink of poverty. I’m still struggling,” Harris said. “I don’t have any justice. What justice? I lost two years of my life. I did the best with it that I could; what do I get for that? ‘Oh, we made a mistake?’ That’s cheap.”
Last year’s trial came after a judge stunned the courtroom in 2018 by throwing out a plea deal that would have sentenced Harris to six years in prison and Almena to nine. Judge James Cramer said Almena had not shown enough remorse to merit the plea bargain. While the judge did deem Harris remorseful, the deals were done as a package so both were dissolved.
Harris is particularly careful with his words when asked about Almena or the Ghost Ship’s ongoing legal battles. He may testify on Almena’s behalf at the next trial, which is expected to start March 30, so he didn’t want to say anything that could compromise his friend’s case.
The two remained close in custody, but he hasn’t been allowed to visit Almena since his release in September. A rule prevents former county jail inmates from visiting Santa Rita for six months after their release.
“A circumstance like this with someone, it’s obviously a certain life bonding, which goes both ways,” Harris said. “When you’re bonding to a person it’s just not always just pleasant things. But there sure were a lot of those.”
Harris also maintains an uncommonly close friendship with his defense attorneys: Curtis Briggs, Tyler Smith and Jimmy Mulgannon. Not long after the trial, he gave the lawyers matching tattoos of a fly inspired by a Zen Buddhism book he gave them during his incarceration, with the hopes that he would soon be free. Harris said he plans to get the same tattoo.
When Briggs initially accepted the case pro bono, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary. He saw a client who badly needed a public relations campaign — a courtroom tactic frowned upon by most judges but embraced by Briggs and Almena’s attorney, Tony Serra.
Almena was considered the brasher of the two defendants, and prosecutors accused him of ignoring fire codes and calls to make the space safer. Harris was seen as more sympathetic, but he had a role in planning the party and was working the door at the time of the blaze.
The attorneys’ plan was to inject more publicity into the case and paint a sympathetic portrait of starving artists who were failed by their landlord, fire inspectors and bureaucrats. Then they would hand off the case to a public defender.
“But Max and I developed a relationship and a rapport where I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving him,” Briggs said. “We all believed in him so much, we just knew he was innocent. That’s the kind of case I became a lawyer to fight.”
Briggs erupted in tears in the court when the jury foreman listed Harris’ 36 “not guilty” verdicts.
“We were trying to free the kindest gentlest young man ... from essentially this completely evil bureaucratic system that was scapegoating him,” Briggs said. “So, yeah, I lost it when the jury came back.”
Victims’ families contacted by The Chronicle for this story had little to say about Harris.
“I’d rather not talk about him,” said Colleen Dolan, the mother of 33yearold fire victim Chelsea Faith Dolan. “I have feelings about it . ... I’ve had time to digest the new trial and the civil trial and everything else, and it hasn’t been easy.”
Dolan, who attended every day of the trial that ended in Harris’ acquittal and a hung jury in Almena’s case, is bracing to do it all over again.
Throughout the trial, victims’ families were unmoved by Harris’ story. After Harris took the stand in his own defense, David Gregory, the father of 20yearold victim Michela Gregory, told The Chronicle he had expected Harris to show more remorse.
“After two days of listening to him, I’ve lost all the respect I had for him,” Gregory said at the time.
Prosecutors Casey Bates and Autrey James declined to be interviewed for this article.
Sheriff ’s officials helped spirit Harris out of the jail within an hour after the verdict, and he slipped by without a single media outlet snapping as much as a photograph. A woman in a car was waiting for him.
Aside from his attorneys, Harris had no greater defender than Danielle Silva, a petite woman with a blue mohawk who was unwavering in her support and took the lead in organizing “Free Max Harris” protests.
On one occasion, Silva was arrested and jailed during a demonstration for allegedly violating an order to move away from courthouse property. Another time, TV crews captured a heated exchange between Silva and some of the victims’ family members, who became fed up with her portrayal of Harris as a victim.
Harris and Silva didn’t know each other before his June 2017 arrest. They met during the case’s initial proceedings through Carmen Brito, a mutual friend and former Ghost Ship tenant who escaped the warehouse the night of the fire. Like many Ghost Ship residents, Brito defended Harris and Almena as fall guys for a system that failed them and those killed in the fire.
“We weren’t hiding,” Brito said in a recent interview. “We were in a residential neighborhood, in a fairly prominent position in Fruitvale, that’s around the corner from the Fire Department. We were all going, ‘We saw you, and you saw us. How can you stand there and say that you had no idea?’ ”
Silva came to a hearing to support Brito and began exchanging letters with Harris.
“If you think about being, in many ways, in literally the loneliest place on Earth and meeting someone so special,” Harris said. “I don’t really know how to put that into words, how much of a blessing that is.”
The couple have since settled into an airy, exposedbrick loft in a historic part of downtown Portland. The space is a “little bit closer to an apartment,” Harris said, but like his Ghost Ship residence and his old jail cell, it also doubles as an art studio.
Harris’ reasons for relocating to Portland were largely practical: He’s now closer to his mother, who lives in Washington. Oregon also provides a place where he can decompress and be closer to nature, he said. And the cost of living is lower.
Despite Oakland officials’ vows to protect artists and other lowincome residents in “nonconforming spaces” after the Ghost Ship fire, Harris said, he’s seen countless friends pushed out of their homes.
“It’s either forcing people into homelessness or forcing them into having to change their lifestyle in a way that compromises their heart,” he said. “It was a bunch of empty promises, and it’s only gotten worse.”
Friends of Harris say the tragic fire, the extended stay in jail and the taxing trial, which featured him taking the stand in his own defense, took an extreme emotional toll.
Brito recalled a moment a few months ago, when she was driving with Harris and Silva while they still lived in the Bay Area, and the couple were discussing where they wanted to move.
“He was in the passenger seat, and he just kind of turned around and he just said, ‘You know, I don’t know if you know what it’s like to be me, here,’ ” Brito said. “The way that he looked, it was just so sad. So haunted.”
Silva said Harris has started to regain his physical self. He’s eating vegetables that weren’t available in jail and doing what he wants with his hair. The slick ponytail seen in court was soon replaced with dreadlocks and then a shaved head.
“I think jail takes so much away from you, and there’s no surviving well,” Silva said. “The one thing I feel like he hasn’t lost is this vibrancy about life.”
“I’m still on the brink of poverty. I’m still struggling. I don’t have any justice. What justice? I lost two years of my life.”
Max Harris on life after Ghost Ship