A crowd of restaurant patrons helped chase down a man in the International District late Friday after he stole money out of a woman’s car and then stole the car.
Around 11pm police received a report of a crowd of eight to ten people pursuing a man near 12th Avenue and South Jackson Street.
When officers arrived, they found several people holding the suspect down on the ground.
The victim told police she had been sitting in her car in a parking lot at the corner of the intersection when the suspect opened her unlocked passenger door, lifted up her center console and pulled out a handful of loose cash.
The victim ran from her car into a nearby restaurant and asked for help.
Meanwhile, the suspect hopped into the driver’s seat of the victim’s car and began trying to start the vehicle with the victim’s key, which she had left in the vehicle.
The victim ran back out of the restaurant, climbed into the passenger seat of her car and tried to stop the suspect from driving away.
The suspect backed the car into a van parked in the lot before pulling onto South Jackson, where he struck another vehicle in the road. He then jumped out of the car and ran southbound on 12th Avenue. The victim grabbed onto the suspect, who struck her in the face and kept on running. A large group of patrons from a nearby restaurant were able to chase after the suspect and hold him down until police arrived.
Officers recovered the money stolen from the victim’s car: four crinkled one-dollar bills and a quarter and booked the 53-year-old suspect into the King County Jail for robbery and a felony Department of Corrections warrant.