Police found a bullet, splintered wood, and a bloody washcloth at the scene of a bizarre incident at a South Lake Union hotel this morning.
Just after 2 AM, a man and his family were startled awake by a loud bang in their fifth floor hotel room.
After finding a bullet on the floor near his daughter’s bed, the man went down to the lobby to talk to the hotel’s manager, and called police.
Officers searched around the victims’ room and found that the bullet had been fired through the wall of a neighboring room, rented out to a group of teenagers earlier in the evening.
Officers knocked on the door of the neighboring room and although they could hear the sound of a TV inside, no one answered the door.
Officers went down to the hotel’s lobby, where they found two of the four teenagers who had checked into the second room earlier in the evening.
Both teens—males, one 14, the other 18—initially gave officers different stories, but police were eventually able to piece together that the teens had been in the room with a teenage female and another teenage male, who had been carrying a gun.
While the details are still a bit murky, it appears that at some point the gun went off inside the teens’ room, sending a bullet tearing through a bed and the wall of the hotel, into the neighboring family’s room. The teenage male with the handgun and the female fled shortly after the incident.
Police weren’t able to find any victims at the scene, but officers did find a bloody washcloth in the teens’ room.
Officers interviewed the 18-year-old man and released him from the scene. Police also called the 14-year-old boy’s mother to come pick him up.