A weekly distillation of musical goings-on, local and otherwise.
On Aug. 16, Ben Blankenship of popular local alt-country band Ghosts I’ve Met rounded up a crew of his burliest chums and headed for an apartment in Greenwood. His posse’s purpose: track down the prick who broke into Blankenship’s car and stole his laptop and digital camera, among other things.
“We knocked on the door, and this voice comes out from behind: ‘Who is it?!?'” says Blankenship. “But he never answered, so we went home.”
If Blankenship and his pals getting vigilante sounds a little extreme, it’s for good reason. As Blankenship tells it, he discovered his vehicle’s window damaged in Ballard (where Blankenship lives) the night before. The aforementioned electronic items were gone, and the alleged thief— in an act of Darwin Award–worthy brilliance— left behind a bag from Home Depot with the receipt in it, on which his driver’s license number and street address were printed. (He also left behind a Pawn X-Change preferred customer card.) According to the receipt as Blankenship read it, the alleged thief had purchased five E-Z Breakout tools.
“This is what they market to people if they go over a bridge and their car sinks underwater,” says Blankenship. “If you just so happen to have this tool in your car and your windows aren’t manual, you just bust open the window with this.” But the tool also serves more sinister purposes, and is thus popular among car thieves.
Naturally, after getting ripped off, Blankenship called the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct, which said that no one would be available to assist him that day. The next day, Blankenship walked the evidence into the precinct office, where he was told that someone would call him eventually. Days went by and Blankenship heard nothing. He called again, and they told him the detective assigned to his case, Bruce Larsen, was on vacation and wouldn’t return until Aug. 28.
“Whether we dispatch someone to check it out or not depends on what time of night it was and who’s available at the time,” explains Det. Larsen. “But I can tell you that, as a detective, the first thing I think is that just because a bag was left in the car with the receipt inside doesn’t mean that person was the thief.”
Blankenship is aware of this. But since, in his opinion, the law hasn’t been any help, he has been forced to take matters into his own hands.
“The thing that upset me the most was not that my stuff was stolen, but that [the alleged thief] had purchased five of these tools,” says Blankenship. “Doesn’t it sound like he had planned a whole string of break-ins? If only they would have looked at the evidence, they might have stopped a whole rash of crime that night.”
