Men in Seattle crime spree to face judge

SEATTLE — The men police said robbed two people and tried to rob a third in one night are due in front of a judge on Monday.

KIRO 7 spoke to one of the victims and pieced together the 90 minute crime spree.

“I heard someone yelling, 'My purse! My purse!'" Courtney Vogel said.

Vogel said she was about to go to sleep when she heard a woman screaming outside her window in Arbor Heights.

That woman was so shaken up she didn't want to show her face on camera, but described a man grabbing her purse from behind as she walked along 35th Avenue Southwest around 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 21.

"I grabbed my purse and turned around and then he pointed the gun to my forehead," she said.

Vogel said another neighbor, George Pierce, rushed outside to help that woman call 911.

She said the suspect, wearing a white hoodie, ran down the hill to a silver car parked near the church. She could see two other men waiting inside the car.

"I watched them fly through the stop sign, and the front end of their car goes boom! And then they take off," she said.

But police weren't far behind.

"Within less than a minute I heard the sirens and cars, cop cars, two or three of them ripped down this street," Jessica Pierce, whose husband helped the woman, said.

Police took Abdulkadir Ahmed, Hassan Abdirizak and Najib Aden into custody.

They said the crime spree started about 1.5 hours earlier and 9 miles away on Beacon Avenue.

Police said a woman was waiting for the bus to arrive with her cell phone out. She said a man with a bandanna over his face pointed a gun at her and demanded it. When she tried to run away, she said he grabbed her hair, threw her on the ground,put the gun to her head and took off with the cellphone.

After that, police said the trio tried to rob a man of his cell phone on Fauntleroy Way Southwest near the ferry docks, but one of the men got spooked and they headed for Arbor Heights.

One of the robbery victims said she's glad they're caught but she won't walk alone in the neighborhood again.

According to police, two of the suspects also admitted the group committed about seven other robberies around Cal Anderson Park.

They said they used a pellet gun that looked like a real gun in all of the robberies.

KIRO