A Child's Plea for Help
A three-year-old girl leads an officer to a locked room to rescue her mother from an abusive husband.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Yesterday forenoon a little three-year-old girl stopped a copper on Commercial street with the following query: 'Mister, I wish you would point out a policeman. My papa is awful mean, and I must go down to get a policeman.' Constable Van Doren was pointed out to the little girl, and to him she told her tragic story. The constable, child and reporter started up Front street. Upon reaching Sullivan's block, the child directed the officer up stairs to a door marked 'Dr. Wahl.' The officer knocked and the door was opened by a medium-sized, dark-complexioned man. 'That's my papa!' shouted the child. As the officer entered he noticed the woman stretched out on the floor, where she claimed her husband had thrown her after choking her nearly to death. The woman said her husband was cruel and had ill-treated her ever since they had been married, and that he also beat and abused his little girl. When asked about the trouble, Dr. Wahl said he was trying to seal up a box he had packed preparatory to leaving his wife, and she had sat down on it so he could not do it, and he had thrown her off. The woman said the first thing this morning her husband had called her the vilest kind of names, and in order to punish him she had refused to cook his breakfast. In retaliation he decided to leave her. When she objected to him taking her personal property, he grabbed her by the throat, choked her, and tore her to the floor.
“My papa is awful mean, and I must go down to get a policeman.”
This domestic violence intervention on Front Street (now First Avenue) highlights the era's reliance on 'swearing out a warrant' to stop abuse. Today, Seattle's legal framework for domestic violence protective orders and the recognition of domestic abuse as a public, rather than private, concern reflects a hard-won departure from the 1886 culture of police mediation and 'red tape.'
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