Two Seattle men accused of targeting women for robberies and rip-offs on Capitol Hill have been charged with raping a woman in February after DNA evidence linked the men to the assault.
Kirose Hailu, 23, and Wolid Mohammed, 22, are accused of raping a 21-year-old woman who told police two strangers sexually assaulted her in an alley shortly after she left the R Place nightclub.
“The defendants jointly and forcibly, sexually assaulted a complete stranger on the street,” Senior Deputy Prosecutor Carol Spoor said in charging papers.
CHS reported on the winter 2014 attack here in February. The prosecutor says investigators matched DNA recovered from the woman to Hailu and Mohammed by summer. The fall charges were first reported by Seattlepi.com earlier this week.
When prosecutors filed the second degree rape charges, both men were in King County Jail awaiting trial on identity theft charges. The two are accused of working together to steal a woman’s wallet outside a Capitol Hill gas station in October.
According to the charges, the rape victim and her boyfriend had been drinking at a friend’s house on February 27th before heading over to R Place. She told police her memory of what happened next is hazy.
The woman remembered staying at the bar until 2 AM, but said she began blacking out soon after leaving. The victim’s boyfriend told police that after leaving the bar, he and the group of friends walked across the street to Hot Mamma’s Pizza. He soon realized his girlfriend wasn’t with them and called her phone repeatedly, but she didn’t answer.
The woman told police her next memory was walking alone in an unknown alley, pulling herself along on a railing, when two men who smelled heavily of smoke approached and asked where she was going. She recounted to police how both men then sexually assaulted her at the same time.
After the suspects left, she told police she pulled up her pants and moved into a more well lit area. A homeless man who found her after the attack helped her back to her apartment building, she told police.
In July, investigators obtained results from a rape kit that linked Hailu and Mohammed to the assault. Both men are being held in King County Jail on $500,000 bail each.
It’s really sad how much terror these folks were able to inflict on the neighborhood before the police caught up with them. I’m happy they were caught and hopefully they’ll have a long time in prison.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s low enough to victimize somebody, but to do it when they’re described as being incapacitated to the point of blacking out occasionally, that’s lower than low.
Good to see these losers out of circulation for a long while.
I notice the plural “women.” Are there other cases as well?
[…] against some of the people hauled in during the emphasis patrols and some of the people who were allegedly preying on Capitol Hill victims. But, by the end of the year, many of the street robberies on and around Capitol Hill had been […]