Seattle Police foiled two kidnapping attempts this week. In what’s undoubtedly another sign of our new economy, criminals appear to have moved from stealing stereos and TVs to stealing people:
On April 2nd, Seattle Police arrested two men and a teenage girl after the group allegedly kidnapped a 20-year-old woman, in an apparent attempt to force her into prostitution.
According to a police report, friends of the 20-year-old woman contacted police on April 2nd, and told officers that two men had kidnapped their friend and were driving her around Seattle.
The 20-year-old woman had been sending text messages to her friends, giving them clues to her whereabouts and police were able to track the woman’s cellphone to Kent.
There, officers arrested a 24-year-old Seattle man along with a 22-year-old man and 17-year-old girl, both from Bellevue.
All three were arrested for investigation of kidnapping and promoting prostitution.
Yesterday, officers also arrested a 65-year-old man in the Pike Place Market after he allegedly tried to make off with a 5-year-old boy.
According to police, a couple and their three children—ages 5,6 and 7—were walking through Pike Place yesterday afternoon when they stopped to remove a rock from the mother’s foot cast. When the parents turned around, their 5-year-old son was gone.
Police say the mother spotted her son being led away by a man and began to chase them. The man let the child go and fled.
The woman flagged down several SPD bike patrol officers who later found the man—identified by police as 65-year-old Robert Paul Steiner—and booked him into the King County Jail for investigation of kidnapping.
Sounds like capitalism at its finest!
Mom chased the kidnapper down wearing a foot cast? Go Mom!
Um… “65-year-old man kidnaps 5 year old boy in tourist hell” hole does not scream “ransom note” or any other money making proposition to me… It screams child molestation… Which I think was just as popular during the boom times.
Don’t forget it was a 65 year old. That couldn’t have been too hard to catch.
How dumb do you have to be to allow your kidnap victim to keep her cellphone?
Those Bellevue people. They’re like animals over there.
Probably behind on their mortgage payments.
This should be in the “Old Homos Abducting Little Boys” Watch.
My next-door neighbor is 65, and he could probably outrun pretty much anyone on here. 65 is not precisely decrepit these days, kiddies. He’s a marathon runner.
…however, he is NOT kidnapping small children to molest them. I thought perhaps that needed clarification…
where was the young woman picked up?
are there details on how they got her into a car?
strong arm, weapon involved?
I’m sure someone will find a reason to blame it on gay marriage.
As a new parent who recently got into an altercation with someone because he pushed his bike gears into our stroller (and not only didn’t apologize for it, although ten witnesses agreed that he was completely at fault, but actually tried to claim that it was my fault for not moving the stroller out of the way of a bike I didn’t see), I can say confidently that I would have attacked and thoroughly beaten that 65-year old.
@12:
I think @8 is already moving in that direction…
#5, they had probably just finished watching “Taken”.
11
In other words WHAT COLOR WERE THEY?
If the 65 year old pervert had been a youth pastor I wonder how Dan would have played it?
@17
65 year old youth pastor? Whom does he pastor? 45-55 year olds? Sounds like a run of the mill catholic priest to me.
I blame gay marriage.
I blame straight marriage, god damn it.
I just blame everyone else, depending how they differ from me.
The old man was trying to snatch a gay bride to run off to Vermont.
This is less like kidnapping and more like sex slavery. Scary shit.
there were four of them in the car an no one noticed she was texting? geez, it sounds like a scene from a very bad movie.
@23 Exactly. If one is kidnapped and then forced to have sex, that isn’t prostitution, that’s rape.
#10 – then what was he kidnapping them for? (ba-da-boom!!)