King County prosecutors have charged Samuel Pietro Evans, an Everett resident with the murder of Jackson Schley and the rape of his wife, Daisy Schley on January 9, 1972.  Here is the account of what happened from the probable cause charging document (attached to this post at left):

In the late evening of January 9, 1972, Jackson Schley (dob 10/12/13) was found shot to death in his home at 975 20th Avenue, Seattle WA.  At the same time, Jackson’s wife, Daisy Schley, was found in the woods a few miles away, bleeding and disoriented.  Daisy Schley reported she had been abducted and raped by the man who had shot her husband.

Earlier that night, at approximately 7:30 p.m., Jackson and Daisy Schley returned to their home after purchasing ice cream at a nearby store.  As they entered through the front door of their home, Daisy Schley heard a noise and suspected someone was in the apartment.  At that time, a black male, approximately 30 years old, emerged from the dining room.  The male pointed a gun at the Schleys and ordered them to their knees.  Daisy Schley reported hearing two gunshots.  The suspect then took a wallet from Jackson Schley’s back pocket.

The suspect then ordered Daisy Schley to go with hi and he pushed her out through the back door of the apartment and forced her to his car, parked a short distance away.  The suspect then drove Daisy to a wooded area where he parked. He ordered Daisy to remove her clothes and he then raped her.

Police were able to take a DNA sample from Daisy Schely’s underwear but the case remained unsolved at the time of her death in 2007.  In 2009, the DNA profile obtained from Daisy Schley’s underwear was run against profiles in the DNA database and “hit” upon the DNA profile of Samuel Evans (dob 5/18/38): “The chances of finding another profile matching that is 1 in 820 quadrillion“. Evans’ profile existed in the DNA database because of the current practice of collecting DNA from select incarcerated individuals.  Evans had served a 20 year sentence for a sexual assault conviction in Las Vegas and had been released in 2007.

Evans’ profile has also matched the DNA evidence (cigarette butts) taken from the 1968 murder of James Keuler at 3500 East Schubert Place.  Evans is being held in King County Jail on $1M bail.

Utility post for updates to SeattleCrime iPhone App

An early spring has many of our neighborhood streets busting out in color, at a level much higher than I remember in previous years.

Earlier in the week I though that this street in Madrona would be the best one around. This is looking north on 32nd from Howell:

Based on a reader recommendation, I made it over to 15th Ave yesterday and found four solid blocks of flowering trees that stretches between Yesler and Jefferson. Here’s some examples:

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According to our highly scientific polls, only 13% of you are happy with your current internet services. 

But Tony Perez, Director of Seattle’s Office of Cable Communications, says the city is developing plans to bring you a whole new level of broadband services. At tonight’s Let’s Get Connected event, he described a future where the city has built a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network that reaches every home in the city, providing a huge leap in internet speeds and reliability, at an affordable price.

Although the infrastructure would be municipally owned, it would be an “open access” network, meaning that private operators would compete on top of it to bring you services such as internet access, phone service, or hi-def cable channels.

The way Perez describes it, our current offerings suffer from their history, having taken old broadcast technology and grafted network services on top of them. But fundamentally, they’re still designed to provide more bandwidth downstream to you, and less back upstream from your home. But the new generation of internet services are fundamentally interactive, and we need a network that lets you send data as quickly as you can receive it. A completely new fiber-optic infrastructure would provide that.

The interesting thing is that it can be done without a tax increase. According to Perez the entire $450 million system could be financed through municipal revenue bonds, issued against the future service fees that people would pay to access the network. And once construction started the project is funded, the first homes would be turned on within 18 months, with city-wide build-out in 3 to 4 years.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Seattle had decided that the city could step in and provide what private industry was failing at. In 1900, the privately owned Seattle Electric Company provided power to residences and businesses across the city. But at $.20 per kilowatt-hour, it was expensive – several times more expensive than today. In inflation-adjusted terms, those rates would make your typical $75 electric bill in 2010 skyrocket up to $4,000.

So in 1902 city voters decided to allow the city to issue bonds to start a municipal electric system, and today we have Seattle City Light, which provides some of the lowest electric rates across the nation.

A municipally-owned fiber-optic system would do something very similar, taking a service that is critical to the modern economy and using the bonding power of government to build a state-of-the-art system that is accessible to everyone in the city.

Perez says you can help out by filling out Google’s forms for their new fiber-optic program. Although it would only pay for a fraction of Seattle’s total system, it could be the key piece to get it all started.

Ok, so I’ve spotted a 40 lb. raccoon (weight is an estimate – but it’s HUGE) walking around my block for the last couple of weeks.  In fact, the raccoon must have a den somewhere close, because it is in my background, as well as those of my neighbors daily.  He/she comes out so often at night, that my friends are afraid to approach my house (very dimly lit walkway). 

I’ve been in contact with the City and County animal control departments and they don’t remove wildlife.  Looks like I’ll have to hire a trapper to come out and get it/them.  I’m curious if anyone else near 28th Avenue South (I live between Lane and Dearborn) is having the same problem.  If so, would you be interested in sharing the cost for a trapper to come out to our neighborhood? 

Thanks

Note: We’re going to be tied up in some other activities and unable to monitor the scanner for the next week or so. So enjoy the scannering today, and stay tuned for a full return to action late next week.

Here’s all the excitement from the sweet streets of Seattle’s East Precinct:

It was great to see everyone at our CDNews Happy Hour last night. Though that was the first one in a year and half, we’ve resolved to do it on a semi-monthly basis from here on out. 

The crowd was great, about 50/50 split between CDNews old-timers who have been around since the beginning of the site, and several people who just moved into the neighborhood.

It takes events like that to remind me that not everything on the site is immediately self-explanatory. So here’s a recap of how CDNews works and what we’re all about:

• CDNews is a community site! Anyone can sign up for an account, log in, and be able to post stories and other content to the site. Reader posts start off on the /stories page, and CDNews editors will promote many of those items to the front page based on content, page-views, ratings, and comments
• The rating system is a key tool. If you’re logged-in to your account, 4 or 5 stars to the content you really like, 1 or 2 stars to what you don’t care for, and click “report abuse” on anything that is spam or has hateful or threatening content. We use ratings to help us choose what to promote to the front page, so be sure to rate what you like so we’ll know what is important to the community.
• Registered users can also post events to the community calendar, create business reviews, and post in our classifieds area.
• The staff behind CDNews is small and efficient. It’s me, the editor/publisher, and starting this month we’re bringing on seadevi as a paid contributor to cover neighborhood culture and other activities. About 30% of our stories come from people out in the community, and we depend on your participation to get a more diverse set of voices on the site.
• CDNews is supported by advertising from neighborhood businesses. Anyone can create their own ad using our self-serve system, or contact our sales guy Eric at [email protected]. As advertising revenue grows, we’ll use that to bring more paid contributors onto the site.
• This isn’t our full-time job. CDNews started off as a beta site for Neighborlogs, a software platform we’re building that allows anyone to build and manage their own neighborhood news community.

So thanks to everyone being a part of CDNews. And if you’ve so far only been a reader, we’re looking forward to you getting more involved by commenting or creating full posts on the site.

The Capitol Hill blog has a post about a “coop building party” on Cherry Hill this weekend. Sounds like a good way to learn more about having chickens in your own yard, and learn how to build a chicken coop.

It will be at the Cherry Hill Farm, located at 1127 15th Ave

Saturday, from 9am to 9pm, show up any time

Here’s the CHS post:

http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2010/03/02/attention-capitol-hill-chicken-farmers-coop-building-party-this-weekend

If we were just cynical opportunists in search of pageviews, every week we’d find a way to talk about internet and cable access and our local provider, Broadstripe. Numerous posts have been started in the past by unhappy community members, always running into the scores of comments.

Tomorrow the Hidmo Community Empowerment Project is sponsoring a community event to talk about neighborhood connectivity issues. I’ll be part of a panel discussion about neighborhood internet access, and I’m interested in a quick survey of our readers to see where things stand:

Stop by tomorrow and join in the discussion. It’ll be an interesting and informative event.