Sandy MaloneSeattle, WA – Seattle’s social justice warriors are victim-shaming a woman who was raped by a homeless man in a car dealership parking lot.
Lindsey, the victim, had stopped at Carter Volkswagen in Ballard to drop her car off on May 14, 2018 and was waiting for the dealership’s shuttle to take her to work when she went to use a restroom located in a temporary trailer in the parking lot, according to KOMO.
Christopher Teel, a six-foot-five-inch 24-year-old homeless man who had recently been living in one of the tiny home encampments nearby, attacked Lindsey in her bathroom stall and raped her.
Lindsey, a 40-year-old with children at home, fought her attacker and screamed for help. She told police she eventually “surrendered because I didn’t want to die,” KOMO reported.
Dealership employees and other customers heard Lindsey’s screams and rushed to her aid.
They found her cowering on the bathroom floor and Teel naked from the waist down, according to KOMO.
Dealership employees “detained the individual by tackling him and held him until police arrived,” Carter Volkswagen’s Executive Manager Jennifer Moran said.
Police arrested Teel and took him to police headquarters, where he confessed to having followed Lindsey into the bathroom to rape her, KOMO reported.
Then he head-butted a Seattle police detective.
Teel was charged with first-degree rape and unlawful imprisonment and pleaded not guilty in King County Superior Court.
It turned out that at the time he rape Lindsey, Teel had a warrant for his arrest for failure to appear in Seattle Municipal court for a gross misdemeanor charge of first-degree criminal trespass, according to the Seattle Times.
Teel, a transient from Texas, had lived in a few of the city’s homeless encampments since he arrived in Seattle during the summer of 2016.
However, all of the city’s sanctioned shelters and camps have different policies regarding background checks for the residents, the Seattle Times reported.
Homeless advocates have argued that drug tests and warrant checks are barriers for an already disenfranchised population.
So while Teel’s identification had been checked against a sex offender list at one of the tiny home encampments, administrators had never checked to see if the man was a fugitive, according to the Seattle Times.
Opponents of the city’s sanctioned homeless encampments, which they say have been popping up with alarming frequency, pointed to the increase in crime in their communities since the shelters opened.
Carter Volkswagen attributed a spike in vandalism and property crime to the growing homeless population, KOMO reported.
Ballard resident Erika Nagy said the rape was the final straw, and complained that her concerns had been ignored by those at City Hall.
“I have every right to be mad,” Nagy said. “This is enough. I want my city back.”
Ballard Oil owner Warren Aakervik, who has lived in the community for more than 70 years, has joined Nagy’s efforts to recall Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien, KOMO reported.
Both complained that garbage, tents, drug needles, and crime have become commonplace since Ballard Nickelsville opened, and expressed concerns about what kind of people are living in the free tiny homes.
Teel’s victim met with city officials in the wake of her attack but said that her safety concerns were dismissed by the city’s leaders, the City Journal reported.
A year after she was raped, she filmed a short documentary video and told her story to the world in the hope that sharing the details would get the attention of lawmakers.
The City Journal released Lindsey’s documentary on April 22, and resident renewed calls for background checks of residents living in Seattle’s homeless encampments.
But even as long-time Ballard residents lamented the path their community had traveled, liberal activists went after the rape victim on social media.
Journalist Erica Barnett posted a vile series of tweets victim-shaming Lindsey.
“There is almost no difference between this video and Trump parading white families who are the rare victims of violent crime by immigrants to “prove” to his supporters that immigrants should, as a class, be treated as less-than other human beings and locked up for “our” safety,”
Then she shamed Lindsey for potentially triggering other rape victims by telling her story.
“Finally, it’s worth noting that graphic descriptions of violent rape may be triggering for survivors, and that using a survivor’s story to push a revanchist political agenda is exploitative and works against policies that would actually address the problem,” Barnett posted.
Barnett suggested that the City Journals Christopher Rufo had made the documentary with Lindsey because the victim was white and blonde, and said the media coverage of her rape was “about the media’s skewed notion of which victims are worth covering.”
Throughout her tweets, she implied the victim was lying and said the whole story was being used to unjustifiably attack homeless people and their housing.
But on the very same day Barnett was attacking a rape victim on Twitter, the Seattle Times published a story that revealed a 221 percent increase in reported crimes and public disturbances in the neighborhood of Licton Springs where a new encampment had opened.
Witnesses said crimes of property destruction, violence, prostitution, and drug dealing had increased dramatically in the community around the encampment.
Furthermore, statistics from the King County Jail showed that homeless individuals were 38 times more likely to commit crimes than the average citizen, the Seattle Times reported.
Homeless people make up .5 percent of Seattle’s population but account for 19 percent of the city’s jail bookings.
Families who live nearby the sanctioned homeless encampments complain they regularly encounter people shooting up in their yards and an immediate increase in thefts, the Seattle Times reported.
Teel’s victim has made the important point to city leaders that they facilitated her rapist’s presence in the community, KIRO reported.
“He was using public services to survive,” Lindsey said. “I think we all need to acknowledge what we’re doing isn’t working. What we’re doing right now is actually harming us and we need strong leaders. And strong leaders, in my opinion, are out there.”