Slog tipper Tea Lopez says she was maced by a man shouting transphobic slurs, including "tranny" and "bitch" at about 11 p.m. last night, as she walked to a bus stop with her friend, who is transgender.

According to Lopez and the subsequent police report filed by Officer Edward Medlock, a gray-silver SUV pulled up and stopped suddenly in front of them as they stood waiting to cross the intersection of Bellevue Avenue and East Pine Street.

A man jumped out of the car and ran up to them. "He asked if we like mace, and then he maced us," Lopez says, though she and her friend turned away swiftly enough that most of the spray landed on their jackets and bags. She heard him say something in Spanish, then remembers hearing the word "tranny" and something like "You stupid bitches like mace" while she was trying to avoid getting hit. The man quickly got back into the backseat of the vehicle and it sped off.

"I grabbed a random stranger and I was like, 'Can you hang out with us until the cops get here?' I was terrified," 30-year-old Lopez explains, and the stranger obliged. Her friend was freaked out and didn't want to speak to the cops, so she left. But Lopez says the officer who arrived, Officer Medlock, "was really awesome." She says she explained that she considers it a hate crime—the car pulled up and there was a pause before the man jumped out and assaulted them, she says, as if he decided to go after them—but that's not mentioned in the police report, which does corroborate the rest of her story. Another officer undertook a search for the SUV, whose license plate Lopez says she remembered and shared with police, but didn't find it.

Lopez has lived on Capitol Hill for the past 10 years, through she recently moved to North Seattle, and she's upset at seeing her former neighborhood transformed by what seem to be regular, violent attacks based on gender and racial identity. "It really bothers me that I don’t feel safe walking down a well-lit, well-traveled street to the bus station. Now I’m definitely going to employ the buddy system. Which is fucked, because I’ve been walking around by myself in that neighborhood since forever," Lopez says.

And she'd like to see Seattle police step up their foot patrols in the area surrounding the Pike/Pine corridor, where people are walking home or to buses late at night. "You never see any beat cops or foot patrol. They just drive around that area. I feel like they should spread out their patrol a bit more to cover those areas."

I asked Detective Mark Jamieson from SPD's Public Affairs Unit for his response to Lopez' suggestion of beefed up foot patrols—he said he'd get back to me. (Last time he said that, I never heard anything from him, so don't count on an update soon.)

You can read about past alleged hate crimes—there were two last month—on Capitol Hill here, here, or here. When is this shit going to stop?