My Seattle neighborhood had a plywood and GoFundMe kind of Thanksgiving | The Seattle Times

2022-12-02 19:37:24 By : Ms. Lucky Zhang

For Bruck Tewolde, the most surprising part about having your business rammed by a van and then looted is how ho-hum everybody is about it.

“It started with the police,” said Tewolde, owner of King’s Deli in Seattle. “They said, ‘This is normal.’ They said, ‘It’s not only you, it’s regular. It’s everywhere that this is happening.’ “

Last week three men drove a van four times into the entrance of King’s Deli. It damaged the building’s foundation, knocked out power and totaled the cast-iron security gates and glass front doors. It worked, though, as the thieves then emptied the business of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise.

While the police were at King’s Deli investigating, they got a call that another store on the other side of the Madrona neighborhood, in Central Seattle, was under a similar attack. A van, which was stolen, crashed into the front gate and doors of Madrona Market and Deli, leaving a black tire mark on the store’s linoleum floor. There the thieves stole all the tobacco as well as computer sales devices.

The Madrona Market owner, Daniel Abraha, said he estimates damage and losses will be $50,000. Just building temporary plywood doors to secure the gaping hole left by the van cost him nearly $4,000, he said.

Both Abraha and Tewolde are originally from Eritrea, next to Ethiopia in East Africa.

“Seattle has so much opportunity for people like us,” Tewolde said. “But then it has so much craziness. People are just, ‘Oh well.’ The people come in and look around at this and say, ‘Have you started up a GoFundMe yet?’ “

There were three GoFundMe online fundraisers going for crime-struck businesses in Madrona this past week — for King’s, for Madrona Market and for HONED, a one-woman jewelry shop that also got ransacked by thieves recently. That store, around the corner from the Madrona Market, had its front door smashed in by a different group that stole an estimated $100,000 in gemstones.

The GoFundMes have become part of the ritual of how we process crime in the city. There are at least a dozen going currently for crimes around Seattle — for a shooting at Powell Barnett Park in the Central Area, for example; for a Rainier Avenue business owner injured in a robbery; for a Delridge minimart owner who confronted a shoplifter and broke her hip.

The GoFundMes are therapeutic, like a community barn-raising. They help provide instant money for recovery, as insurance claims can take time and rarely cover all the damages and lost business.

But there’s also a sense the fundraising has become a stand-in for action. It’s what people do to feel like something is being done, because the city isn’t doing much of anything.

“I know this feeling of violation and helplessness all too well, and it’s really indescribable,” the owner of a Madrona consignment shop wrote when giving to one of the recent GoFundMes. That shop, Katy Bird, had its front windows smashed in and its contents looted earlier in the year. After which the community held a GoFundMe.

King’s Deli sits at East Cherry Street and Martin Luther King Way, a spot still called “Catfish Corner” though the restaurant by that name moved years ago. The low-slung King’s store is known for its fried chicken and JoJos, for its aisle of East African staples such as masoor dal lentils and injera bread, and, to generations of kids at nearby Garfield High School, for its soft serve ice cream machine.

On a recent day, a trickle of customers commiserated with Tewolde and wondered if he was going to make it.

“You guys are the small guys,” one man said. “They need to leave the small guys alone.”

They don’t. One local commercial door repair company Tewolde contacted told him they have an eight-week backlog for work orders. That’s a long time to stay under plywood (the break-in was Nov. 17).

There’s so much plywood hanging around town that the city last month started a “Storefront Repair Fund.” Small businesses can get $2,000 to help pay for smashed windows and doors. More than 400 businesses had applied as of last week.

Beyond that, Seattle continues to struggle to hire more cops, though it is trying. But the city has yet to stand up any meaningful noncop patrols to help in the neighborhoods. So some business groups have taken to hiring their own.

Property crime data for the Madrona/Leschi neighborhood suggests an elevated plateau, similar to the rest of Seattle. This year is about the same as last (435 reported property crimes through 10 months of 2022, versus 454 in 2021, police say). But both figures are about 30% higher than 2020 or 2019.

I shared the storefront-repair link with Tewolde. He showed me one estimate for the hole where the van drove through: nearly $12,000 for a door and new gates. That doesn’t count the sections of the wall that need to be rebuilt, or the electrical work.

He said the repair funds are nice gestures but they seem beside the main point. Especially if the fad on the street now is to steal vans or trucks and use them as battering rams.

“I can rebuild, but this is a city problem right now,” he said. “I don’t have any security in my feeling. I don’t have any feeling that this won’t happen here again.”

Plywood and GoFundMes are not a crime-fighting strategy. During the pandemic they were necessary; they were do-it-yourselfer acts of resilience. Now they are pervasive signs of something else: a city that can’t get its act together.

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