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Olympia bowling alley declares ‘open season’ on tweakers
Jul 19, 2018, 6:18 PM
The bowling alley's sign has given a bold message to tweakers for the past two months. (KIRO 7)
(KIRO 7)
An Olympia bowling alley owner took matter into his own hands to put a stop to the crimes taking place on his property.
Dan Brathoud, owner of Aztec Bowling in Olympia, posted the words, ‘Open season on tweekers,’ on the reader-board outside of his bowling alley two months ago.
“We’ve been dealing with quite a bit of crime and garbage and people taking dumps on our property,” he explained to KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “We’re pretty fed up with this thing. We’ve called the police on several occasions, we have people taken out and trespassed on a weekly basis, and, you know, we finally just were fed up.”
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Brathoud said that the words were not chosen to encourage violence against drug addicts, but simply to get people’s attention so that they would pay attention to what businesses like Aztec Bowling are going through.
“It doesn’t seem like anything is going on to prevent this anymore, so we put out a provocative statement on our reader-board to let people know that we’re not going to take this anymore,” he said.
One woman snuck through the back entrance of the bowling alley and injected heroin in the bathroom, leaving used needles behind. In another instance, drug addicts kicked out the back wall of an out building. Brathoud said that when he put up barbed wire to keep trespassers out, the criminals cut the wire, got onto the property, and left needles everywhere. Brathoud finds garbage everywhere around the property daily.
“We really wanted to make a statement so people would start noticing what’s going on around here,” Brathoud said.
As Brathoud’s family has owned the bowling alley since 1972, he has seen the way in which the streets have changed over the years. In the past, he said, “you could go outside and feel safe,” but now he walks each of his employees to their car every night because “things have gotten so crazy around here.” Brathoud said that there is a “massive” homeless encampment just blocks from the bowling alley.
However, it appears as though Brathoud’s sign could be making a difference — since putting the message up, he said that the instances of trouble between criminals and bowling alley staff and customers is “down significantly.”
“We’re a clean and family-friendly environment around here, and we’re not going to take any BS from people who try to make it otherwise,” Brathoud declared.
