Elderly couple ambushed
A Spokane Valley couple in their 80s spent Monday morning at the bank, stopping their checks and canceling their credit cards after they were assaulted and robbed the day before as they returned home from seeing the musical “Gypsy.” Ed and Beth Tietjen wondered how they became the targets of such a brazen, violent and apparently random crime.
“They were waiting,” Ed Tietjen, 88, said Monday outside his home on the 11100 block of East 22nd Avenue, where on Sunday afternoon a man and a woman were seen in a four-door, late-1990s sedan about 10 minutes before the attack.
When the Tietjens pulled into their garage, the man ran toward them, but the garage door came down before he could enter.
“I guess it made him mad,” Tietjen said of the assailant, who kicked open the side door of the garage and swore at him. “Before I could get out of the car, he hit me twice.
“Then he ran around and opened my wife’s door and grabbed her purse,” Tietjen said.
The assailant threw a punch at Beth Tietjen, 87, but it was only a glancing blow. She showed none of the purple bruises left on her husband’s face. His jaw was swollen and the inside of his mouth was cut.
The sound of the door being kicked open just before dusk drew the attention of neighbors who came running to help. But the assailant – in his 20s, 6 feet to 6-feet-2 inches tall, with dark hair and wearing blue jeans and a checkered coat – escaped in the sedan, driven by a woman with dark, shoulder-length hair.
How or why were the elderly couple targeted?
The Tietjens could only speculate. Perhaps the robbers had seen Beth cashing a check on Saturday, followed her home and returned to lie in wait for her on Sunday.
The couple could not remember any previous crime on the tree-lined street of rancher homes where they have lived for 40 years.
“We’re kind of scratching our heads, too, as to the motive,” Spokane Valley police Sgt. Matt Lyones said, particularly because the suspects were there ahead of the victims.
He said major crimes detectives were investigating.
Asked whether the Tietjens were taking any precautions since the incident, Beth wondered how anyone could prepare for such an attack.
“There’s not a damn thing you can really do,” she said.