Local News

Beth Gunn’s bicycle was stolen recently while she was on vacation. That put her in a real pickle because the bike was the only set of wheels she had to get to work from her Queen Anne apartment.

Gunn got her bike back, but in a most unusual way.

She spotted it strapped to the front of a RapidRide bus.

Read her story in a post by one of our community partners, the Seattle Bike Blog, which described Dunn’s good luck as “a little serendipity and a lot of thief stupidity.”

Seattle police are investigating an attempted abduction of two children from an after-school program at a Queen Anne elementary school.

According to police, the suspect approached a staff member at the program housed at Coe Elementary, in the 2400 block of Seventh Avenue West, at approximately 3:40 p.m. on Thursday and said he was there to pick up two children.

The suspect knew the full names of both children and claimed he had been asked to pick them up by their father, who was reported to have had car trouble, police said.

The staff member followed protocol and told the suspect he needed to show ID in the program’s office before signing the children out for the day.

The suspect never showed up at the office, so staff contacted the kids’ father. Police were called after the father told employees his car had not broken down and he had not asked anybody to pick up his children.

Police said the suspect was described by staff as a light-skinned male in his late 40s to 50s, 5-foot-10 to 5-foot-11, 180 pounds, medium to heavy build. He was wearing a beige winter coat and a dark-beige baseball cap, and had gray hair, stubble and squinty eyes.

Police are looking at several leads in the case and continue to investigate.

A woman spotted inside a house in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood in a daytime break-in may need to practice her cat-burglar skills.

Police say that when she was spotted by the returning homeowner, the intruder jumped from an upstairs window — right into the handcuffs of a patrol officer.

Detective Jeff Kappel says police had responded Sunday afternoon to 911 calls about two suspicious people in an alley and then a report of a woman breaking a window at the back of a house.

Police searched the house and surrounding neighborhood but were unable to locate the second person.

Kappel says the 36-year-old woman was booked into jail for investigation of burglary.

CORRECTED VERSION

A 20-year-old woman was shot in the chest in a drive-by shooting in Kerry Park early Friday morning.

Police said she does not appear to have life-threatening injuries.

Seattle police are reporting that officers investigating a small fire in the area about 2 a.m. were approached by a woman who told them her friend had just been shot and was being driven to Harborview Medical Center.

Seattle police Spokesman Mark Jamieson said witnesses reported that the victim was standing near a Ford Focus when she was struck by bullets fired from a passing Chrysler 300.

Police located a Ford Focus with recent bullet damage, and other officers found an unoccupied Chrysler 300 in Lake City. The Chrysler was impounded for further investigation.

Jamieson said the investigation is ongoing, but detectives don’t believe the shooting was random.

In an earlier version of this story, it was mistakenly said the incident occurred Thursday evening. It occurred about 2 a.m. Friday.

Human remains were found this morning in Seattle as parks employees cleared blackberry bushes from an eastern slope of the Queen Anne neighborhood.

Police say Seattle Parks employees were working on a steep hillside in the 600 block of Galer Street when they found the remains at about 11:40 a.m. The workers told detectives it looked like the bones were in an overgrown campsite.

Seattle Police Department homicide detectives and the King County Medical Examiner’s Office are investigating the death.

Seattle firefighters put out hotspots at this vacant house at the corner of 3rd Avenue North and Ward Street in the Queen Anne neighborhood after it was destroyed in a fire this morning. There were no injuries. (Photo by Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)

A vacant house in the Queen Anne neighborhood was destroyed in a fire this morning.

Seattle firefighters were called to the home at 303 Ward St. at 12:26 a.m. on reports of the blaze, said department spokeswoman Lt. Sue Stangl. The house was packed with items, so the fire quickly spread, Stangl said.

“There was a lot of fire when crews arrived,” she said.

The fire department had been placed the house on the department’s “dangerous building list,” Stangl said. Known vacant properties, businesses where hazardous chemicals are used and buildings with unique architecture that would create challenges for fighting fires are placed on the list, Stangl said.

Nobody was hurt in the fire and no other properties were damaged, Stangl said.

A man was threatened at gunpoint in Queen Anne’s Kerry Park, then assaulted by a group of people who punched and kicked him, according to Seattle Police.

The assault happened around 2:42 a.m. Sunday. The victim was with friends at the park in the when they were approached by another group. One of the men pointed a gun at the victim, who covered his face with his hands. The other men in the group began punching and kicking him, according to police.

The victim dropped to the ground and began crawling away; the gunman fired a shot into the air.  The assailants then fled, police said.

The victim received injuries to his head from the suspects’ punches and kicks.

A Lower Queen Anne food bank that closed in November because it lacked funding has reopened.

Staff at the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic Church a few feet from Seattle Center, held a re-opening ceremony at 8:30 this morning. The food bank quietly reopened last week, said Elise Hale-Case, who runs the food bank.

For decades, people in need found a hot breakfast, a sack lunch and groceries at Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic Church near Seattle Center. The program closed on Nov. 18 because it lacked the $2,500 per month it needed to pay for its single full-time employee.

Case, the full-time employee who had been running the program, said that hundreds of donations had been received since a story ran in The Seattle Times last year about the program closing.

Weather: Punxsutawney Phil may have predicted six more weeks of winter, but today in Seattle is slated to be balmy and sunny, with highs in the 50s. Here are the details.

Traffic: Traffic is smooth so far, but it’s early. The details.

An apartment fire in Lower Queen Anne was out by 6:50 a.m. but traffic was still being diverted away from West Olympic Place, Seattle Fire Department spokesman Kyle Moore told KING-TV.

A woman was transported to Harborview around 9:45 p.m. Thursday after being shot in the head in in an incident near Tukwila International Boulevard and South 116th Street.  She was in critical condition.

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