Random Violence Shakes Residents’ Feelings Of Safety
Brandon Stevens bought the Spokane image: a rental home in Nevada-Lidgerwood inexpensive enough for a beginning architect’s salary, a five-minute drive or bike ride to work, solid public schools for his daughter, and a crime rate much lower than his native New Orleans.
He moved to what he thought was the last of the All-American towns eight months ago.
Now, in response to a pair of beatings on Spokane’s North Side and several violent crimes in recent months, as well as a better paying job in the Midwest, Stevens is leaving. He is getting ready to leave what he calls just “another place with a problem with crime.”
The victims in both the beatings were relatively young men - both 35 - who worked in professions that require physical strength. That is hardly the profile of a victim, Stevens said.
“If I can’t feel comfortable walking to 7-Eleven at night, how can my daughter?” said Stevens, 37, a broadshouldered 5-foot-10.
“There was that old guy (assaulted) downtown, the guy beat up with his mother a couple of weeks ago, the two girls this summer, breakins around here,” said Stevens, counting off recent incidents on four fingers held stiffly together. “That’s a lot.”
A pair of violent beatings last month and a drive-by shooting near Wellesley and Monroe on Oct. 30 have acerbated an underlying fear and confusion among both born-and-raised and newly transplanted North Side residents.
The two beatings happened less than a week and two miles apart and have no apparent motive. Police have youths in custody for the Oct. 20 beating of John Hintz and for the drive-by shooting, in which several buildings were hit with gunfire.
Police cannot find a motive in any of the three - leaving the crimes in the frightening category of “random violence.”
George Telfer, 73, a Shadle Park resident for 38 years, said he no longer invites people he doesn’t know into his house after dark. Shadle Park resident Marcia Wood, 70, says she won’t even answer the door at night if she is not expecting guests.
“People find it abhorrent that this thing can happen in their neighborhood,” said Telfer, a retiree who volunteers at the COPS Northwest substation.
“It has made us all more wary as neighbors,” said Wood.
The family of one beating victim has not released the victim’s last name, just his first name - Jeff - and sketches of his background.
Six months before being beaten into a coma with an ax handle, Jeff returned to Spokane from Los Angeles to live in a more peaceful, less violent atmosphere.
“We grew up in Spokane and felt comfortable,” said Tim, Jeff’s brother, who also recently returned to Spokane after several years away. “Now we don’t.”
The family of the second beating victim, John Hintz, has also felt tugs at their image of Spokane. Jackie Ogle, Hintz’s mother, has lived in Spokane 47 years and does not understand the spate of random violence.
Since then, she has started waiting for her bus on a friend’s porch, locks the deadbolt lock immediately and has stopped walking from her Nevada-Lidgerwood home to her mother’s house 10 blocks away.
“When I was growing up, I would walk all over,” said Ogle, 53. “I have never, ever been scared. It’s not my town anymore, I guess.”
, DataTimes