SEATTLE — A 13-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy accused of intentionally hitting pedestrians using stolen cars on Aurora Avenue were charged Tuesday in King County Superior Court.
Both are charged with second-degree assault, and the 15-year-old is also charged with possession of a stolen motor vehicle and hit-and-run with injuries. The Seattle Times typically does not name juvenile suspects unless they are charged as adults.
In early December, police released cellphone video taken from inside two cars that showed pedestrians being targeted, along with surveillance footage from nearby businesses. After the videos were made public, both victims came forward and reported suffering serious injuries, police said.
The cellphone footage shows a driver intentionally targeting a woman walking in a driveway on North 107th Street, just west of Aurora, early on Nov. 26. In the videos, someone can be heard telling the driver to “hit this [expletive],” and then saying “yeah” after they collided. At least two people are heard laughing in the footage, according to probable cause documents filed in Superior Court.
The other video shows a woman in a white coat standing in a bus lane before the vehicle hits her in the back, causing her to crumple on the hood before she was tossed aside, according to the documents.
An Everett police officer received the footage from two people who knew the teenagers. They determined the vehicles shown were likely a white Hyundai and a black Kia that had both been reported stolen. Everett police shared their investigation with Seattle police, who learned from witnesses that the teenagers were dating. A detective determined both assaults had been on Aurora Avenue North.
A nearby business provided video of the assault on North 107th Street, and Seattle police shared footage of the suspects’ assaults online and with news outlets.
The woman hit at 107th was being interviewed as a victim of an unrelated crime when she told police she also had been a victim of a hit-and-run on Aurora. Several times during the interview, a detective wrote, she began to cry. “This incident had obviously taken a mental toll on her,” the detective wrote. The woman had suffered deep scrapes, bruises and nerve pain, according to the documents.
Another victim called the SPD tip line to report she was the victim of the other assault, according to court documents. That victim said she was walking back to her car, and the next thing she remembered, she regained consciousness to find herself lying in the road, according to the documents.
She got a concussion and had other wounds on her limbs. She started getting fatigued easily and was scared to leave her home, according to charging papers.
Detectives secured a search warrant for the 13-year-old’s phone and recovered the videos and time and location data matching the assaults, according to the charges. Witnesses said the 13-year-old’s voice sounded like the voice egging the driver on in the videos.
A friend of the 13-year-old girl gave police photos of her boyfriend, who looked like the boy in the footage, according to the probable cause documents. Glimpses of the rearview mirror caught on the video also showed his reflection, according to the documents.
Text messages recovered from the 13-year-old’s phone revealed she and her friends joked about driving stolen cars and “hitting hookers,” according to the documents. Internet searches made on the phone also showed “aurora streetwalker hit and run,” “stolen kia,” and “possession of firearm first degree.”
The Hyundai and Kia allegedly used in the two assaults were both later recovered by law enforcement and deemed a “total loss,” according to the documents.
