As crime rises in Seattle, one mother considers moving after disturbing incident involving her children
SEATTLE - Crime in Seattle is up, and increasingly it seems more residents and business owners are feeling fed up and considering leaving.
"I've loved Seattle but I feel like it doesn’t love me back," said Wallingford resident Myra Levitzke.
Levitzke has found herself in a predicament.
"I think as a parent you have all these things happen and you’re like, at what point do I have to leave because it's become unsafe for them?"
When her family first moved to Wallingford they loved it, but in the last few years Levitzke says it’s gone downhill.
They’ve been victims of a home invasion multiple times. Just recently she went to a local dog park and came back to her car’s windows smashed.
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"I'm so used to it at this point you know, probably 3 or 4 weeks prior to that I was taking out my garbage and someone stole two of my bikes like in the 5 minutes I went to take out the garbage."
But it’s another incident that happened two weeks ago that was really the nail in the coffin.
On New Years Eve, her 13-year-old daughter was with a friend outside the Wallingford Center, just a block from her home. That’s when a grown man approached her daughter and said something vile and very sexually explicit. When her daughter began to back away the man went towards her, grabbing for her arm before she took off running.
"She called us at about 7:10 pm screaming that some guy was harassing her. She said he kind of looked like a dad, so she was so taken back that he would say something like that to her."
It was a shocking, terrifying experience for her, especially happening so close to home.
"What he said to her was so upsetting, she couldn't fully tell us what he had said, because it was so embarrassing. It was so vulgar."
Levitzke called police around 7:30 pm wanting to make a report but she says no one showed. She says she called back around midnight and still no one showed.
Seattle Police told us they did go to the home around 12:30 am. They noted while they do not want there to be long delays in responding to calls, it was New Years Eve, a very busy day for them, and they were on a priority call status.
Levitzke said she does not believe officers ever came that night, and if they did they didn’t notify her.
"By the police and the city not responding it's telling my daughter that yes a guy can say these obscene things to you, he can try to grab you and it's OK because the city is allowing this to happen ... I just feel like abandoned, I feel like my daughter was abandoned, and I think that’s the part that hurts most not that this happened to her, but that the city absolutely doesn’t care."
Levitzke ended up reaching out to SPD again last week and filing a report. She says she doesn’t necessarily blame Seattle Police. She thinks the bigger issue is City Council cutting their budget, spreading them so thin it makes it much harder to respond to some calls.
She reached out to her city council member after the incident occurred but never heard back. At this point, she says she feels crime is pushing her out of the city she loves.
"I hope people start paying attention to local politics and who we're voting into our city council."