Woman beaten in Tacoma alley; neighbor catches it on video

TACOMA, Wash. -- A Tacoma couple is on a mission to get justice for a woman they don't even know after they saw her being brutally beaten outside their home. They're hoping by sharing the images caught on video, it'll alert others about the violent crimes they feel are on the rise in their neighborhood.

“I don`t know what`s going on in Tacoma, but I fear the change that is happening,” said Frank Barilani.

On Thursday, they said they watched as their surveillance video caught this woman getting punched in the face repeatedly while in their back alley of their East Tacoma home.

“I saw them pull that woman out of that car, and I thought 'this is odd,' and then they cornered her and started beating her,” said Barilani’s fiancée, Sarah Olee.

The couple said the assault is one of three crimes they`ve experienced this month. Just days before, they say their home was burglarized and days before that, they were victims of a home invasion.

The couple says with all the crime they’ve seen, their surveillance system has come in handy.

As for the latest assault caught on camera, Tacoma police say they`re investigating but wouldn`t go into details of who the suspects are, or their motive. Regardless, Barilani and Olee say it's scary someone would beat a woman. It’s also concerning that it would happen in daylight in their neighborhood.

“Nobody should ever have to go through that regardless of what the situation is,” Olee said. “I was honestly shocked that they would decide that this was a place that they would want to do something like that but I`m glad it was this place that they chose to do it because we were here to intervene to stop them and gotten worse than it already was.”