By Daniel Beekman

The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Seattle Mayor Ed Murray ended his campaign for re-election Tuesday — bowing out of a race that weeks ago he had been expected to win easily, shutting the door on a second term in Seattle’s highest office and aborting a political career that’s spanned decades.

Murray’s decision comes a month after he was sued for alleged child sexual abuse dating to the 1980s and less than a week before the official candidate filing period begins.

“It tears me to pieces to step away,” Murray said in an emotion-filled, often sentimental statement at the Alki Beach Bathhouse in the West Seattle neighborhood where he spent part of his youth.

With supporters and staff standing around him and frequently interrupted by their applause, Murray recalled his childhood, how he grew to love politics, and his role — as a gay man and politician — in the evolution of gay culture and civil rights.

“I’m happy because I have been part of some remarkable achievements.”

Those achievements ranged, he noted, from the state’s “civil rights bill to the ring I wear on my finger.”

After that, Murray — who has strenuously rejected the abuse allegations — announced he was withdrawing from the race. He plans to serve out his term, which runs through the end of the year.

“My heart aches,” he said, explaining that campaigns should be about the future, but this campaign would now surely be about “scandal.”

Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole, appointed by Murray early in his term, was in the audience. “I think it’s the sign of a leader to put the city … before his own interests,” she said.

Local labor leader David Rolf said after the mayor’s speech: “I think what we just saw was an act of selflessness.”

Murray has denied claims by Delvonn Heckard, a 46-year-old Kent man who filed a lawsuit against him, and similar allegations by other men.

And as part of the statement he read to the gathering in West Seattle, he said the allegations “paint me in the worst possible historic portrait of a gay man.”

The day after the lawsuit was filed, Murray struck a defiant tone, vowing to continue his bid for a second term.

“Things have never come easy to me in life, but I have never backed down and I will not back down now,” the mayor said at the time, with his husband looking on.

But the accusations — including extremely graphic claims — thwarted the mayor’s best attempts to carry on with business as usual.

There were headlines about Murray’s genitals, as an attorney for the mayor sought to rebut a detail in the lawsuit by presenting the results of medical exam showing no trace of a growth or mole.

There were aggressive legal maneuvers by Lincoln Beauregard, a lawyer representing Heckard, whom a judge last week fined $5,000 for ethics violations.

And there were the other men, whose shocking allegations about the mayor bore similarities to Heckard’s story about what he said happened to him when he was a crack cocaine-addicted high-school dropout living on the streets of Seattle.

Jeff Simpson and Lloyd Anderson have said they were abused by Murray when they were growing up in Portland, Ore., where for a time one of them was Murray’s foster son.

Then last week, a fourth man, Maurice Lavon Jones, signed a sworn declaration in Heckard’s case saying that he, too, as a teenager in the 1980s had been paid by Murray for sex.

Simpson, who was Murray’s foster son for two years in the 1980s and has said he was sexually abused by Murray starting at age 13, said Tuesday he had “mixed emotions” about the mayor’s political downfall.

“I think what he has done for the city of Seattle has been awesome, man,” Simpson said by phone from Portland. “I feel for Seattle. I do. But I think that these are some of the consequences that he has to face.

“The consequences that the survivors of him have gone through have been 100 times worse than that,” he added.

Simpson first made the accusations against Murray in 1984, leading to a police investigation that resulted in no charges.

Anderson, reached in Florida on Tuesday morning, said Murray “needs to resign immediately. That’s all I have to say about it. It’s not good enough.”

The mayor pushed ahead with his work despite the allegations. None of his big supporters pulled their support for his campaign, instead giving him time to try to bounce back, even as former Mayor Mike McGinn jumped into the race.

But as the weeks wore on, the pressure on Murray to withdraw from the race grew.

A Seattle Colleges commencement speech the mayor had been set to deliver was canceled, with no one willing to say whether the allegations were the reason.

An op-ed by Murray in The Stranger attacking Heckard and the media was widely panned, as the mayor drew attention to his accuser’s criminal history.

And despite reports of voters being polled on the sexual abuse claims, his campaign remained tellingly mum about the mayor’s standing in the court of public opinion.

Murray supporters asked Seattle’s ethics commission whether they could set up a fund to collect donations to help the mayor pay for his legal defense.

Democratic state Sen. Jamie Pedersen said the mayor’s Tuesday announcement was a tragic conclusion to a long political career.

“Public service has really been his life for the entire time I have known Ed,” he said, citing Murray’s work on civil rights, transportation and budgets in the Legislature.

“I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to be five years short of retirement and see all of that just come to an end with an abruptness nobody could have predicted two months ago.”

Pedersen added, “My personal view is he has done a remarkably good job as mayor and has accomplished an awful lot … It’s just a sad situation for everybody involved that we get to this point and we’re going to lose his talent and ambition and connections and leadership skill.”

About a dozen other candidates for mayor have registered campaigns, including McGinn, educator and activist Nikkita Oliver and urban planner Cary Moon.

Democratic state Sen. Bob Hasegawa joined the race Monday, and it’s likely other big-name candidates will enter the fray now that the mayor has made way.

Murray is a progressive Democrat who built political influence as a state representative and senator brokering transportation budgets and fighting for gay rights as the state’s leading gay politician.

The 62-year-old unseated McGinn to become mayor in a hard-fought 2013 contest after helping lead the push to legalize same-sex marriage in Washington.

Under Murray, Seattle has set its minimum wage on a path to $15 per hour and voters have approved a succession of tax hikes to boost the city’s spending on everything from parks and transit to subsidized preschool and affordable housing.

Murray’s greatest challenge has been responding to a proliferation of homelessness and unauthorized encampments on sidewalks, under bridges and along highways.

Being mayor, Murray said Tuesday, has been the “absolute, absolute opportunity of a lifetime” for a boy who started dreaming of a career in politics at age 12.

Murray wore a green tie, and during his remarks, he spoke of his family, his Irish heritage, President John F. Kennedy and concluded with a quote from late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”