Online hoax fuels trashing of Tacoma house

TACOMA -- A house was stripped nearly to the studs last week after a bogus online classified ad invited people to come in and take what they wanted.

Now, while the owner of the picked-apart house seeks answers, Tacoma police say the case is so unusual that they're not sure how it will be investigated or prosecuted.

The blue house in the 1200 block of East 64th Street is owned by Laurie Raye; she bought it in 2001 from her mother, who continued to live in it until moving recently to a nursing home, where she died.

Two of Raye's sisters had been living there, but Raye said she evicted them. Police on Thursday confirmed the eviction of Raye's sisters.

Police arrived about two weeks ago to remove them from the home and watched while two men moved the furnishings and belongings from the house into the front yard, neighbors said.

Since then, neighbor Annie Hampton said, people have been helping themselves.

"People have been taking everything that's worth taking," Hampton said. At one point, she said, cars were lined up for a chance at the haul.

The free-for-all took on new life late last week, Raye said, when someone posted an ad on craigslist.org, a popular online classifieds listing, that invited people to come inside the unlocked home and take anything they wanted.

The ad was pulled quickly, she said, but was up long enough that scavengers stripped the house of its light fixtures, front door, vinyl windows, water heater and even the kitchen sink.

Inside the home Thursday, a stack of baseboards and trim pried from the walls lay in a pile in a boarded-up room. Graffiti were spray-painted and marked in crayon on the walls. Strips of stained carpet had been pulled up and thrown aside.

"In the ad, it said come and take what you want. Everything is free," Raye said. "Please help yourself to anything on the property."

Raye said she is not sure who posted the ad. She said craigslist officials provided her Thursday with the e-mail address and IP address -- which is used to identify computers connected to a network -- of the person who posted it, and she passed both along to police. She said she didn't recognize the e-mail address.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said an after-hours customer-service representative initially denied Raye's request for information, but after further review "we gathered enough info to be confident that we would be within the law to release the info to the victim herself."

The ad was online for only about an hour and a half before enough craigslist users flagged it and it was removed, Buckmaster said.

According to its terms of use, craigslist does not review ads in advance, and all content is the responsibility of the person who posts it.

Users help moderate postings by "flagging" inappropriate or misplaced content, Buckmaster explained. When enough users flag a post, it is automatically brought down.

In the time the ad was up, about 100 people could have seen it, Buckmaster estimated.

Police haven't contacted craigslist about the posting, he said.

"Certainly it's an unfortunate abuse of craigslist, and we're hopeful that law enforcement finds out who did this," Buckmaster said.

Even before she called 911 to report the thefts at the three-bedroom home, Raye said, a police officer had noted the craigslist ad as a potential criminal hoax.

Detective Gretchen Ellis, a spokeswoman for Tacoma police, said that, because the case is so unusual, she isn't sure how it will be investigated or prosecuted.

"We haven't really had anything like this before," Ellis said.

Neighbors on Thursday said they weren't surprised to hear about trouble at the home. They said it has the least tidy yard on the block and a reputation for wild parties.

"There was always noise and fights and lots of people coming in and out all the time," said Jonathan Arroyo, 16, who lives next door to the house, its yard now littered with old mattresses, a broken child's pool and a shredded recliner.

"That place has been a circus," said one longtime neighbor who declined to give her name because of fear of retaliation.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com

Seattle Times staff reporter Brian Alexander contributed to this report.