She has moved four times in the past two years. It only takes him a couple weeks to find her again.
He follows her home from work, she suspects.
The Snohomish County mother has wired the outside of her house with surveillance cameras. An alarm in her bedroom is triggered if exterior motion-sensor lights are tripped. She keeps a baseball bat within reach while she sleeps.
She is afraid of her former boyfriend. She believes he has stolen her clothes, slashed her tires, left her hundreds of voice mails and watched her since she broke up with him. He has been convicted four times of breaking a court order to stay away from her. He spent two days in jail. He now faces a misdemeanor stalking charge.
“I didn’t ask for this. I just left,” the woman said. “I want to live a normal life — be able to put food on the table for my kids and not have to do a 35-point inspection on my car or wonder what he’s going to do next.”
The Herald is not naming the woman to protect her identity.
Domestic violence experts say 1.4 million women and men are stalked each year.
The number of victims is expected to climb as technology, such as the Internet and global positioning systems, becomes more accessible and makes it easier for perpetrators to harass, intimidate or threaten victims around the clock.
“The Internet is a new access point to victims. It opens up a whole new realm of stalking. Online Web sites can pinpoint an exact location of where a person lives and perpetrators can access private information. It can make life hell,” said Sandy Bromley, senior program attorney with the Stalking Resource Center, a project of the National Center for Victims of Crime.
Threatening e-mails, text messages or postings on a person’s MySpace Web page may seem harmless but it can escalate to violence, said Danielle Singson, domestic violence coordinator for the Mountlake Terrace Police Department.
The majority of victims of domestic-violence-related homicides were stalked before they were murdered, she said.
“Stalkers generally don’t go away. The crime escalates or they get fixated on someone else,” Singson said.
Parents also must be aware of the use of technology to stalk young people, who have access to the Internet and cell phones. Police have even seen stalkers use the messaging capability found in some online multi-player video games to harass and intimidate young people. Technology can make a stalker bold.
“They may be more aggressive than they would be face-to-face,” said Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Halley Hupp. “People get on the computer and think they’re hidden.”
Hupp recently prosecuted a woman for the felony stalking of her former co-worker. Susan Orozco was sentenced to 10 months in prison. She sent degrading flyers to the victim’s neighbors, her children, other co-workers and potential employers. Orozco also set up two Web sites containing derogatory information about the victim, Hupp said.
Hupp believes prosecutors and police will see more cases of people using the Internet to stalk victims. Unfortunately, the technology can make it more difficult to prove someone has broken the law.
The incidents can cross numerous jurisdictions, requiring police departments to work together to prove that there is a pattern of harassment or threats. It also can be more difficult for police to prove who sent a threatening e-mail. A more traditional stalker may leave behind physical evidence, such as fingerprints or saliva, on an envelope or piece of paper.
Technology such as text-messaging would adapt itself well to a person’s obsessive behavior, said Norm Nelson, a domestic violence counselor and owner of Sno-King Counselors LLC, a Lynnwood counseling center.
Stalking often starts as a person’s need to know where their partner is at all times, he said.
“They’re trying to satisfy nonspecific fears around the relationship. They’re in fear of losing the relationship or they need to control the relationship,” Nelson said.
The stalker may believe that checking up on their partner four or five times a day is rational.
“He is convinced that it shows how much he loves her,” Nelson said.
Domestic violence experts say it is important that victims of stalking don’t ignore or minimize the risk. Oftentimes victims don’t report stalking incidents, or the police treat it as a different crime, such as telephone harassment or vandalism. That can make investigating a stalking case difficult because police must show a pattern of harassment, threats or intimidation, said Megan Sweeney, the domestic violence coordinator for the Lynnwood Police Department.
Sweeney and others from the South Snohomish County Domestic Violence Task Force are planning a community training session later this month. They hope the training will help people understand what stalking is and what can be done to get help.
“Victims don’t want to report that their underwear is missing or the front door was opened sometime overnight,” Sweeney said. “It’s hard to report that. They worry no one will believe them.”
Sweeney remembers one victim became extremely frustrated before police finally took his complaints about an ex-girlfriend seriously. He made several reports before the woman was eventually arrested for stalking.
A good number of cases are underinvestigated, Bromely said.
“Stalking is a course of conduct, an ongoing pattern of behavior. There has to be quite a bit of investigation that goes into it,” she said.
The Snohomish County woman who must keep moving to avoid her tormentor learned to keep a “stalking” log detailing thefts, vandalism and threats she believes are the work of her ex-boyfriend. Sometimes she calls 911. Police officers don’t always take reports, she said. Other times she doesn’t bother calling. She’s afraid she’ll look like an idiot.
“I sit down and read the paperwork and wonder if I’m losing my mind. I’m worn out,” she said. “The worst part is people always look at you like it’s your fault.”
How do you prove that he is responsible for disconnecting her car’s battery or stuffing dirt in the gas tank? Or that he pressed his face up against the window and left a print? Or that he left three dozen voice mails where he said nothing, just played the song, “Every breath you take,” Sting singing the refrain “I’ll be watching you” over and over.
The woman hasn’t always found help. She often must pay to repair vandalism to her vehicles or replace property stolen from her house. She worries that the torment will never stop. She wonders where she’ll get the money to keep going on this way.
She can’t be sure he won’t turn violent.
“I’d like to say there’s a light at the end of the tunnel but I’m not convinced there is,” she said.
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