SEATTLE — Several dozen police officers have joined in the hunt for a man who fatally stabbed one woman and wounded another as they slept in their home, a random crime that rocked a south-end industrial neighborhood, a high-ranking official said today.
Upwards of 75 to 100 of Seattle’s 750 uniformed officers are on the case, Assistant Police Chief Nicholas J. “Nick” Metz told The Associated Press. The stepped up effort includes increasing patrols, reassigning community service officers from other parts of town, and deploying a “mobile precinct” to aid in the dragnet,
“This is our No. 1 priority investigation right now,” Metz said.
“It’s obvious the community has been very fearful of what happened, and rightly so,” he said. “Why he picked this house, we don’t rightly know. …
“We don’t know if South Park is where he wants to be or whether he’s going to move on to other places.”
The mobile precinct is a recreational vehicle-sized rolling police station, which can hold up to eight officers and is equipped with a holding room, restroom, computers and other gear. Officer Renee S. Witt said said it will remain in South Park “until we catch this guy.”
The FBI, Washington State Patrol and other agencies have been consulted to try to determine the identity of the fugitive, and laboratory test also may shed some light, Metz said.
“He’s a complete stranger to us,” he said.
About 400 people jammed into the South Park Community Center to hear from police Monday evening.
“Our community’s in shock right now. We’ve been terrorized,” said Tim Smith, an area resident. “Obviously this person has not been apprehended yet, so what I’d like to ask the police and the mayor is to please provide some additional presence of law enforcement.”
According to investigators, a slender but muscular man in his late 20s or early 30s, about 6 feet tall with a thin mustache, apparently entered a home through an open window and repeatedly stabbed two women about 3 a.m. Sunday.
“They did their best to fight him off,” Metz said.
One of the women, identified by neighbors as Teresa Butz, 36, managed to break free, smashed a window and leaped outside, followed by her partner, he said.
Both women, covered in blood, ran screaming from the modest one-story house and the man fled on foot. Horrified neighbors watched as Butz died before aid could arrive. Her partner, 39, was treated for multiple stab wounds at Harborview Medical Center and has been released.
Before Butz died, “she told me that the guy had told them to do what he asked them to do and he wouldn’t harm them,” Albert Barrientes, a neighbor, told KOMO Television. “She turned around and said, ‘Albert, he lied.”’ Barrientes did not elaborate.
The two “were just about to get married,” said Christine Cherif, a neighbor.
Metz said police had not established a motive for the attack and had not ruled out a sex or hate crime. He would not comment on whether either of the women had been sexually assaulted.
The two women had moved recently to South Park, a residential enclave in a heavily industrialized area west of the Duwamish River and Boeing Field.
Butz was on the board of Compass Center, a social-service agency that helps low-income and homeless people find housing and other services, and she and her partner were active in the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
She was “extremely compassionate and dedicated and really believed in the common good,” Rick Friedhoff, executive director of the Compass Center, told The Seattle Times.
Metz, a 26-year veteran and former commander of the precinct that includes South Park, said he was impressed by how neighbors responded to the attack in the five minutes or so before police and firefighters arrived.
“I thought it was just phenomenal. They put themselves in harm’s way to make that they (the women) were OK,” he said. “After all, they didn’t know where the guy was.”
Seattle has recorded nine homicides so far in 2009, historically “a pretty low number” for the city, Metz said. “Of course, the numbers don’t really mean a thing to a community or a family.”
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