Seattle Police investigated a reported gunpoint robbery Friday night involving squatters who turned on each other inside an empty house on 11th Ave E near Lowell Elementary School.
According to the SPD report on the 7:30 PM incident involving a stolen phone and a reported $300 in cash, a male victim told police he was squatting inside the empty 11th Ave E home “with several other people,” including two suspects that he told police he knew “as acquaintances on the street and inside houses like this one.”
The victim told police that two of the other squatters put a knife to his neck, took his wallet, and told him to leave the house. When he did not immediately comply, one of the squatters said he was getting a gun and went to a closet and retrieved an object. The victim told police he fled the house without waiting to find out if it was really a gun. The victim told police he realized he left behind his phone so he reentered the residence and was again threatened. He fled to a nearby Broadway business and contacted police as one of the suspects followed him.
Police arrived shortly after the call but could not locate any suspects. The report does not specify if the property owners were contacted.
I live next to the house and there has been a lot of activity lately with the squatters. Crawling in through windows, throwing trash in the yard and street, and fighting outside. Does the city care about this or are these folks free to take over properties before the houses are demolished? The police sit in the parking lot across the street for hours at a time and I’ve never seen them show any interest in that property or anything else going on for that matter.
There really should be a limit on the amount of time someone owning an obviously unoccupied house can leave it vacant. These places attract trouble:
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2016/01/seattle-fire-squelches-basement-blaze-in-12thjohn-squatter-house/
How would you differentiate that (legally) from a house that is empty but for sale, and just not selling?
I wonder why it takes so long to start demolishing these houses. The tenants were asked to leave by the end of January, its now over two and a half months later. And that was after more than a year and a half of planning.
Jim98122x on Monday, April 18, 2016 – 5:22 pm said:
How would you differentiate that (legally) from a house that is empty but for sale, and just not selling?
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Once you’ve evicted tenants for a planned tear-down, the clock should start ticking. Abandoned houses are bad news for their neighbors. A vacant lot isn’t going to attract as much trouble.
740 11th ave E was such a good home to me and many others over the last 108 years- was so sad the day we got the notice that it had been sold to developers and we were to be forced out of our homes and into the hands of displacement-to now see it sitting there all vulnerable and busted up breaks my heart— take a look at the 3 homes sitting vacant and busted up at john and 12th- they are owned by the same developer – these structures deserve to be honored and respected until the end of their time and instead they are rotting away meanwhile our city is in a crisis with the highest rates of homelessness ever. perhaps some of the squatters have also been displaced- until it happens to you you have no idea what that’s like- how about the city actually addressing that real problem