Last week, eating noodles on the Ave after work with friends, I was startled at the sight of a young man walking toward our table, a companion trailing behind him. He wore jeans, form-fitting t-shirt, and hipster glasses with dark plastic frames. He wasn’t big or imposing; in fact, he was kind of scrawny. I would have taken him for a computer science major, a harmless record store geek, or just the most innocuous male in the world, not a sadistic would-be rapist, if I hadn’t already memorized his face, revealed in a social media profile picture I’d studied closely just days before.
The young man and his date sat at a nearby table directly within my line of vision. They seemed to be in the early stages of getting to know one other, and once he reached across the table and took her hand, which she did not pull away.
If not the same person, he could have been the twin of a young man whose photo I had seen on social media while researching news stories of recent violent attacks on young women in Seattle’s University District. Last I knew, he was in jail, but maybe the folks back home had bailed him out again, like they did the first time, putting down a half million dollars to secure his release immediately after his arrest. One news article said the judge raised bond to $750,000 to keep him behind bars a little longer. But whether he had remained jailed or was again free, I had not heard, as no further reports had been published.
The attacks had occurred over a four-week stretch from early August to early September in the neighborhood north of the university. I read of an arrest shortly after I had begun a walking routine that included a route through the ravine connecting Ravenna and Cowen Parks, near the area in question.
When police searched the suspect’s room after his arrest, they found his backpack containing zip ties, scissors, a camera, and a small pellet gun. According to news reports the accused—a 21-year-old originally from Texas—would ambush women walking home at night, sometimes violently striking or knocking them down, other times demanding cash or forcing them at “gunpoint” to walk ten blocks north to Ravenna Park and a mattress in the woods. Where he ordered them to lie down.
One young woman told him she’d rather be shot than raped, told him to go ahead and shoot her, and refused to lie down on the mattress. She managed to punch him in the head, knocking off his hat and glasses, and to escape before he was able to do her any more harm.
In another attack, he assaulted two women embracing while saying goodnight, knocking down one woman who fell and hit her head, and punching the other, who chased after him and was knocked down by him, causing her to fall and hit her head. Both women suffered concussions.
He ultimately failed to carry out his fantasies; the women fought back and prevented him from carrying out his disturbed intentions. Police were able to consider him a person of interest because they had encountered him previously. He had been walking in the area at three in the morning while they were investigating a nearby shooting, and he had agreed to be photographed. Police remembered him when a victim described her attacker, which led her identifying her attacker in a photo lineup. The suspect was arrested while driving on University Avenue a few days before the start of fall term, accompanied by a date he had met on a dating app.
Even before I learned of the attacks, I had felt dark undercurrents of potential danger in the ravine. Sometimes it’s not anything tangible broadcasting such vibrations, just moods, sounds, fortuitous meetings on the path, an uncertainty whether the figure approaching is friend or foe.
I stopped dead in my tracks one day on the trail, spooking an elderly, unleashed German shepherd who had startled me. I froze in fear, anticipating the bite. The old dog barked at me and did not stop barking for a long, long while, his woofs echoing in the ravine long after I had been able to release myself from my paralysis and go on my way.
That mournful distress call followed me all through the shadowy winding trails between the two parks, and I could still faintly hear it as I emerged above ground and crossed the street to circle back on the top of the ridge, past a man concealing himself behind a half wall on the corner of the tennis courts and past the encampments in the trees near the picnic shelter. Those details, as well as the story of the attacker and his obvious intentions—thank goodness stymied by unwilling victims and observant police—leads me away from walking in the park for now. Not forever. Only until I can let go the disturbing pictures of dirty mattresses in the trees.
I don’t like walking around Greek Row, never have in all my years in Seattle, since I took a room in the neighborhood way back in 1985. My job at the record store on the Ave. often let out at midnight, and I’d walk home alone up University Avenue, hanging a right on Northeast 47th Street and walking uphill past the alley where a young UW student was ambushed by a famous serial killer on a short walk home from her boyfriend’s fraternity house in 1974, then a few blocks more to the house where I lived with four other young people, all of them strangers to me. Loud, drunken partying in the yards, streets and on the porches and balconies of the mansions with the Greek letters and on the sidewalks around the houses was more frequent than not, but I was lucky; I never ran into any trouble I couldn’t handle.
Then and now, the neighborhood directly north of the UW campus exudes a vibration of aggressive excess and drunken danger and the possibility of violence. Even in the quiet light of morning when most of the university students are still asleep, or quietly walking to their first classes. I can see it in the garbage strewn across the driveways, broken booze bottles and broken eggshells and coffee grounds. That’s why the recent reports did not shock me at all, though I was chilled and mortified to hear of the night time attacks on young women—five of them in all—all in their late teens and early twenties—in blocks around the fraternities and north to Ravenna Park.
The attacks were not the first. These days, much more aware of my vulnerability than when I was 23, I take note of various news reports of crimes around the university campus. This area just north of campus, around the frats, is the university neighborhood that I most often hear mentioned in connection with violent crime in the district. I’ve heard about robberies at frats and sororities and solitary pedestrians being robbed at gunpoint or knifepoint for phones, backpacks, or wallets, and a disturbing number of violent acts toward young women: rapes, attempted rapes, and other violent assaults.
One of the worst of those attacks happened in January 2008, when a student parking her foster parent’s car near the frats on 47th and 18th was savagely attacked with a hammer in the early morning hours. Although she fought him off and screamed for help at the top of her lungs, nobody answered her cries for help. The Seattle Times reported on the attack:
The woman, an engineering student who was a refugee from the genocide in Rwanda, suffered a fractured skull and eye socket. She required extensive reconstructive facial surgery.
She later told The Seattle Times she screamed for help but that no passers-by stopped. She eventually drove her car, dazed and bleeding heavily, to the campus’ north entrance, where she was helped by a security guard.
The student’s attacker was never identified, though he was charged with the crime. As the Seattle Times put it, “Prosecutors have charged an unidentified man with the 2008 hammer attack on a 22-year-old University of Washington student, based on DNA recovered from the victim’s keys.” But until the DNA matches an identity, the perpetrator remains undetected, eleven years following this horrific attack.
I’m not of the demographic most often targeted in such crimes, but I’m also not naïve enough to believe I’m safe just because I’m older. The predator may have made advance preparations or prefer a specific “type” of victim, or he may strike indiscriminately in the opportune moment. I don’t let that knowledge paralyze me. I just let it nudge me to stay aware.
Lately the bus I’ve taken to work in the morning lets me off a few blocks from campus, and I walk past fraternities and rooming houses and across Northeast 45th Street to reach the UW. In the 4700 block of 19th Avenue Northeast, I feel the past revisit; I’m just one block over from my old room, in the same block where the attacker I read about recently in the local news was said to live. Directly across the alley from one of his victims.
Source Readings
Seattle Times: Seattle man charged in series of attacks on young women in the University District
Seattle PI: Charges: Woman punched kidnapper accused of attacking several people near UW
KOMO News.com: Seattle Woman punches would-be rapist: Now he’s in jail, court file says
Crosscut: Fighting for the right to run—without being assaulted
Seattle Times: Unknown suspect charged in 2008 hammer attack on uw student
Above: Anders Zorn, “Sun in the Forest,” 1907 [Public Domain]