Father looks for answers in daughter’s terrifying Federal Way rape

Published 9:30 am Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Irving’s voice cracked.

“My daughter don’t be out there, she don’t even go to clubs, she don’t drink, she don’t smoke,” he said. “All she do is come home, do her work, eat and trend on her phone or whatever.”

In the week since his daughter was punched in the face, dragged into the woods on 1st Avenue South and raped, Irving has been looking for answers in any way he can.

“Her mother called me crying,” he said of a morning phone call on June 10. “I’m like, what is it? What’s wrong? Because I knew the only time she’s ever gonna call me is when something’s wrong.”

Irving was in North Carolina, where he’s lived for the last few years, when he found out his soon-to-be 19-year-old daughter was assaulted while walking to WinCo Foods at around 7:45 a.m. She was stopping for some food before catching the bus to one of her last college classes of the quarter.

“I broke down,” he said.

Irving had already planned a trip to Federal Way for his daughter’s birthday a few days later, but he told his daughter’s mother he would find the next available flight to Washington and get there as soon as possible.

Once he arrived he learned the horrifying details.

According to the police reports, Irving’s daughter was walking down the street when a black male wearing a black ski mask and black clothing hit her in the face. He is described as being 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighing about 150 pounds. In her statement to police, the victim said she felt dizzy after the punch and stumbled onto the grass where someone pulled her purse. While holding her purse, she was dragged about 10 feet into the woods on her stomach before her purse strap snapped and was thrown aside by the suspect.

The victim told police she was stunned and did not yell for help.

Still on her stomach, she felt the suspect straddle her back. He attempted to pull her pants down with his right hand when she turned to look at him. She could see he wore a black stocking cap with two eye holes cut out. His skin was dark and he had a “noticeable skin tag” along the right side of his neck, the report states.

She only had a moment before he pushed her head down, but it was then she saw he was wearing blue surgical gloves.

As he tried to remove her clothes, she kicked her legs, causing her shoe to come off. She stopped after the suspect put what the victim believed to be a knife against her neck.

“She believed that he intended to hurt her with the knife if she continued kicking so she stopped,” the documents continue.

The suspect raped her for about two minutes before removing himself. She told police she doesn’t believe he wore a condom or ejaculated.

He stepped toward her face, and the victim noticed he was wearing “very clean” white Nike shoes. She closed her eyes and waited until he walked away before calling her mother for help.

At 8 a.m., her mother answered the phone to her daughter hysterically crying.

According to her mother’s statement, she ran from her home to find her daughter walking back. The victim was walking with a shoe in her hand, her purse strap broken and her clothing stained with mud.

“She also described the look of her daughter’s pants as being hastily pulled back up and were exposing her buttocks,” the case report states.

Her mother asked if she had been raped, to which she responded that she needed to take a shower.

After her mother called 911 and the victim was taken to St. Francis Hospital to undergo a sexual assault examination, detectives conducted a K-9 track but did not locate a suspect. They did, however, find an unoccupied tent in the greenbelt that contained two empty boxes of latex gloves – Purple Nitrile exam gloves and Sensicare Surgical gloves. Officers contacted two “transients,” a man and a woman, who told them they know of a black male who “frequents the greenbelt” and goes by a street name that officers were able to identify as a person whom they’d picked up before for a traffic offense.

Having a person of interest, officers showed the victim a photo montage. She couldn’t identify her rapist.

Irving said after he learned of the blue gloves he called WinCo Foods and visited Fred Meyer, Safeway and Rite Aid to see if they carried blue surgical gloves or if they could release video footage of those sales.

“I contacted all of those managers in all of those stores and told them the scenario, what the case was, and they basically said, ‘OK, we’ll be happy to get this information to the police,'” he said, noting that all of the stores carried blue surgical gloves except WinCo. “All they have to do is contact us.”

But they haven’t.

Federal Way police spokeswoman Cathy Schrock said contacting nearby stores is not a priority “given available resources.”

In fact, police tried to schedule an interview with Irving’s daughter, but it was rescheduled and then canceled. It’s caused police to put the case on hold.

“If a suspect were identified through forensic evidence, having victim cooperation in the prosecution is essential for successful prosecution,” Schrock said. “The case will be re-opened at any time the victim wishes to come forward.”

Schrock said it’s a “proven fact” victims who endure significant trauma or stress will remember more detailed facts several days following the crime.

“Once the victim has had their safey restored, it is very common to have clarity, and the victim and investigator can uncover specifics that were not apparent in the immediate time following the crime,” she said.

But the victim’s mother said, “She’s not ready to leave the freakin’ house!”

“It’s like they’re playing a game and it sounds like they’re adding lies on top of injury,” she said. “My daughter’s a strong girl, I’m going to support what she’s doing.”

Irving hasn’t been able to speak to her much either.

“I guess after being prodded and asked by several people the same repetitive questions or whatever, maybe in a different form by others, but she didn’t want to be bothered anymore,” he said. “She didn’t want to relive that incident, I know for sure, at the end of the day.”

Schrock aknowledged that calling police to report a rape can be traumatic to a victim, but she pointed out that the victim didn’t call police, her mother did.

“Reporting a rape makes the incident a public record and can seem like an invasion of very personal and extremely invasive information,” Schrock said. “The steps to complete a rape kit and compiling other physical and forensic evidence can be overwhelming to a victim.”

Still, Irving wanted the opportunity to speak with the lead detective. He went to the Federal Way Police Department on June 13 and spoke to a lieutenant and was told the detective would call him the next day.

Irving said the detective never called him, so he returned to the police department but she wasn’t there.

“A uniformed lady kinda got smart with me, and that was the last thing I wanted to hear,” he said. “I felt like my daughter is already a victim and I was just trying to get some clarification and information.”

He went upstairs and spoke to the mayor. He admits he was loud but says he was upset when the mayor told him he was too busy to talk.

“I said, ‘You’re too busy to talk to a man who’s come over 3,200 miles away because his daughter’s been brutally raped in your city?'” Irving recalled.

All Irving wants, he said, are some honest answers.

A detective called Irving a few days later, but Irving never had the chance to meet with her. Instead, she asked how she could help him and told him she was busy with other cases, particularly a recent stabbing.

“You know, the saddest thing is I don’t think people have any empathy until it happens to them,” Irving said. “And I know the mess don’t get solved in 48 hours, I’m a realist, OK? I’ve been in school, I know something. But at the end of the day, one of the things that keeps troubling me is the lack of empathy.”

Irving said he feels the department disregarded what the family of a rape victim is going through.

“I completely agree with him on how he’s been treated with the department,” the victim’s mother said.

To that, Schrock said, “We at the city can’t comprehend this.”

She said two lieutenants in charge of the Criminal Investigation Section, the chief of police, the deputy chief, and the mayor have all spent time with Irving, which has equated to “hours of staff time trying to assist the father with his grief and lack of understanding as to why he could not be an active participant in the investigation.”

Schrock said Irving was estranged from his family for two years and that he was not welcomed into their home when he came to town.

Irving said “that’s a lie” and said he stayed with them the whole time he was in town, adding that he pays his daughter’s and her mother’s rent and calls them multiple times a day to check in.

“I talked to her momma three times a day, and the No. 1 conversation is, even before this incident, is, ‘How is she doing?'” he said. “‘What’s she doing? What time is she going to school? What time she get out of her classes?’ I mean, you know, she’s my heart at the end of the day.”

The victim’s mother was surprised by the police department’s charaterization of Irving as “estranged.”

“That was never said,” she said. “Those words have never been said. He pays rent here, he provides everything here. He’s been in a completely different state but we speak every single day.”

Irving said he and his daughter have had a “pretty good” relationship but said there was some friction when he decided to move to North Carolina so he could “give her a better life.” That friction has since been resolved.

Feeling like the police department wasn’t canvassing the area like he thought they should, Irving continued his own investigation, eventually contacting a resident who lives near the location his daughter was raped.

The man told him of a strange encounter he had with another man a couple of weeks prior.

“About two weeks ago, some crazy homeless guy comes and is standing in this complex in the area,” Irving said, adding that the two struck up a conversation. “About a week-and-a-half later, the guy was there again and he was talking to [the first man] about some weed or something… I wasn’t really concerned with the depth of that conversation until he told me this: He said, ‘The guy started talking to me and said something about Federal Way police tried to charge him with a rape for whatever reason but dropped the charges.'”

Irving asked the resident if he could provide police his name and contact information, to which he agreed.

And while police aren’t able to proceed with the case until forensic evidence is returned – a process that could take anywhere from six weeks to six months – or the victim decides to “cooperate,” Irving questions why the public wasn’t informed of the rape.

“This predator out there is going to be preying on people who probably don’t even know,” he said. “Because they haven’t notified nobody in those apartment buildings, they ain’t notified nobody.”

Not to mention, he said, every day that the suspect isn’t caught his daughter will question, “Is that him?” when she goes out in public.

“Her life will never be the same, you know?” Irving said. “I gotta wonder what kind of devastating effect this is going to have on her psychologically. You know, to even say it’s going to be hard to trust a man, but have a relationship now?”

Irving wants the city of Federal Way to consider building a fence alongside the wooded area to where his daughter was dragged, and ultimately he wants city officials to think about what they’re doing to make Federal Way safe.

“You have parents complaining, and maybe some of the citizens on the other side of town – of course they feel safe down by the water, but in some of those blue-collar communities, do they really feel safe?” he asked. “I mean, what are we doing here? We’re always trying to make society a better place. We might start with ourselves, and usually when you have a position of authority, of power, it’s usually more important for you to do it because you can lead by example then.”

Irving suggests officers get out of their car to speak to local business owners, residents, the “old lady who’s walking down the street” or the “kid who ain’t your color.”

“Make them feel like, ‘Hey, man, you ever need me? Call me. We’re the police, we’re here to help you,’ instead of people feeling like, ‘Oh, that’s the police. Man, you know we’re gonna get in some trouble.’

“At what point do we say, ‘Hey, we really need to start getting our society to work together, regardless of what color your skin is’?” Irving said. “We have more in common than we will ever have differences because we were raised in the same country. Regardless of our religious beliefs, regardless of political beliefs, regardless of somebody’s ideology, we still want to live in peace and harmony.”

[Editor’s Note: The Mirror opted not to use the name of the victim’s mother or the last name of the victim’s father in this story to better protect the identity of the victim.]