Police describe man sought in New Year's Eve stabbing

Seattle police were searching Tuesday evening for an unidentified man who stabbed a 31-year-old woman to death on New Year's Eve outside her Capitol Hill apartment.

	Harps

The victim, identified by friends and neighbors as Shannon Harps, a Sierra Club organizer, died Monday after she was stabbed multiple times near the door of her apartment building on 15th Avenue. Police have not said whether Harps was targeted or the victim of a random attack.

The Police Department intensified patrols in the neighborhood after the attack, and officers are looking for additional witnesses, spokesman Mark Jamieson said. He said investigators have yet to determine a motive for the attack or whether Harps knew her assailant.

"It's unclear at this point," he said Tuesday afternoon. "That's going to be part of the investigation."

Harps was returning home from a shopping trip just after 7 p.m. when she was accosted in the Howell Street entrance to her apartment building, Jamieson said. Her attacker stabbed her several times as she screamed for help.

Officers arrived one minute after neighbors called to report the attack and found Harps on the sidewalk crying for help. Harps died after being rushed to Harborview Medical Center.

Harps arrived in Seattle about three years ago, moving from Columbus, Ohio, to work in the Sierra Club's regional office.

"It's just a crazy, tragic loss," said Dan Ritzman, Northwest director for the Sierra Club. "This is going to be terrible news for all of her friends in the region."

Ritzman said Harps worked to energize volunteers and activists on environmental issues, sponsoring environment-themed movie nights on the Eastside and helping to push a greenhouse gas initiative aimed at the states.

Years before arriving, Harps had dreamed of coming to the Northwest to work for the environment, Ritzman said. Recently she'd been involved with efforts to care for the forests in and around Mount Rainier National Park and the Dark Divide Roadless Area in Southwest Washington.

Harps, Ritzman said, loved working with people to better the environment. She had an engaging manner with which people found it easy to connect.

"I don't think you could find a person here who could say anything bad about Shannon," Ritzman said. "I wouldn't say she was bubbly, but she had a real solid soul and a presence about her."

Witnesses describe her attacker as white, about 6 feet tall and in his 40s, Jamieson said. He was wearing baggy pants, a blue parka or athletic-style jacket and a dark knit hat. He may also have been wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt.

Jamieson said that the man had a 3- to 4-inch-long beard and that witnesses described him as "scruffy or transientlike, but 'not too dirty.' "

Michael Wells, president of the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, said that such attacks are out of the norm in the dense and bustling neighborhood.

"I think it is certainly tragic and awful. We would certainly hope we could prevent anything like this happening. I don't see any larger implications."

Wells said that at a forum late last year, city officials impressed upon him that there's a "lot of interest" in preventing crime on Capitol Hill.

Still, Wells said, the neighborhood could use more police.

"I would think that this incident specifically points to that fact," Wells said.

Investigators have asked that anyone with information about the attack call the Police Department's homicide unit at 206-648-5550.