Reported by Stranger news intern Garrett McCulloch.

The South Park house in which two sleeping women were attacked early Sunday morning is a lot like the neighborhood in which it sits: a little rough around the edges, but clearly loved. It's located just one block from the South Park Community Center, where last night hundreds of people jammed in to hear what police could tell them about the knife-wielding man who is thought to have climbed into the home through an open window before fatally stabbing a 37-year-old woman and critically injuring her 40-year-old companion. Neighbors said the two women were a couple, and were thinking about getting married.

Christine Cherif, who lives nearby, said she spoke to the surviving victim after she was released from the hospital yesterday. “Physically she’s doing OK," Cherif said. "She’s going to survive. But emotionally we don’t know. We don’t know how we’re going to do, either. It was senseless. It was brutal."

Cherif used to go over to their house to say hello, to chat and check in, to "laugh and carry on." Now she has another, awful memory associated with the place.

“The girls were covered in blood from head to toe," she said. "One had gone out into the street, and the neighbors were putting towels on their necks, and putting stuff on their wounds to keep them from bleeding to death as best they could. But the one girl, she just couldn’t hold on."

Cherif continued: "The neighborhood is totally stressed out. There’s neighbors around here talking about getting guns, people who hate dogs talking about getting barking dogs and what have you.”

At the meeting at the community center, hundreds of anxious South Park residents were given a new police sketch of the suspect and a lot of vague discussion. They aired grievances. They aired fears. They seemed, for the most part, to leave feeling no more comfortable than when they arrived.

Police couldn’t say whether the incident might have been a hate crime based on the women's sexual orientation, though Interim Chief John Diaz said “every motive is still on the table.” (The Seattle Times reported this morning that the department's sexual minority task force has "taken an interest in the case.")

Officials tried, however, to assuage anger related to a feeling in the community that it has generally been ignored by both the police and the city. Some at the meeting said they have hesitated in the past to call police for fear of having their immigration status checked (although Diaz said that kind of questioning violated police policy). Quite a few had complaints about police response times in the area, including the response to the 911 report of the stabbing. The police said it was four minutes. Several residents said it was more like 20 or 25. Other complaints ranged from a lack of lighting at night—at a time when Mayor Nickels is testing out fancy new street lighting in other neighborhoods—to the level of attention police pay when patrolling the neighborhood.

The mayor was there, a sign of both the relative rarity of murder in Seattle and the fact that this violent-predator-on-the-loose story has hit during an election year. “This kind of a thing happening in our community is unacceptable," Nickels told the crowd. "And it happens, fortunately, so infrequently that we’re shocked when it does.”

It was the ninth homicide in Seattle in 2009. New Orleans, in contrast, has had over 100 homicides already this year.

As the meeting let out, there was still a clear—though lighter—police presence in the area. The crime scene tape had come down at the house where the murder took place, but marked and unmarked patrol cars were easy to spot.

“What’s surprising is that they picked that house," said Sue Kershaw, another neighbor. "The person next door had their doors wide open. It obviously wasn’t a robbery. It’s pretty obvious to those of us around: he didn’t go in there to steal something, he went in there to hurt those ladies. Something in my mind tells me he had been watching."

Photos by Stranger news intern Garrett McCulloch.