Issaquah man photographs intruder as he leaps 30 feet from window

An interrupted burglary at an Issaquah home resulted in a 30-foot jump out of a window for one reckless intruder.

Ryan Klee of Issaquah was returning from taking his dog for an early morning walk when he found his third-floor apartment door ajar.

Figuring he must have just forgotten to lock it, Klee entered his home but found someone he didn’t recognize looking back at him.

“Right there in front of me, there’s a guy going through my backpack,” he told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “So I asked him, ‘Who are you? Why are you here?'”

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The intruder came up with excuses about being on the wrong floor and said he needed to leave. But Klee, thinking quickly, locked the door behind him, blocking the man inside.

“I basically told him, ‘Well, you’re not gonna leave, you’re now here,'” Klee recalled. “‘And I’ve caught you rummaging through my items, so you might as well have a seat.'”

Klee was larger than the stranger, so he was not concerned about a fistfight.

In a joking manner, he told the intruder, “You can either wait until the police come and be escorted out, or you can go out the window … we can do this all day long, I don’t necessarily have to go to work, I’m not going to allow you to leave, so I can just stand here all day.”

After a brief physical altercation, the suspect grabbed a knife out of Klee’s dining room and ran at him with it, telling Klee that he would “gut [him]” and cut his neck.

Klee, however, was undeterred. To calm the intruder down, he began asking rational questions like, “Do you see something here that you want? What is the purpose of this? What are you going to get out of this?”

“I just had a sense that maybe this guy isn’t really going to do what he says he’s going to do,” Klee said.

Despite any danger, Klee felt that he had to stay in place to protect any of his neighbors who could potentially be in danger if the suspect returned.

“That’s why I took the actions that I did, to try to prevent this,” he said. “You’re not going to come in here and hurt me or any of those other people who live around me. We’re the ones who live here, not you.”

Faced with the prospect of law enforcement or ledge, the intruder chose the ledge. He slashed the window with a knife, took the screen off, and climbed out to take the 30-foot drop. In disbelief, Klee ran to the window with his phone as the suspect jumped.

“I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re not about to do that,'” Klee said. “I got to the window and sure enough, he ended up leaping out.”

The suspect landed on his feet and ran off.

Luckily, a police K9 unit was able to track the suspect down through his scent. Issaquah police arrested the suspect, identified as Ryan Dresser. According to KIRO 7 TV, Dresser’s bail is set at $100,000.

Klee documented the entire incident for police in a series of photos, but ended up getting viral internet fame. One of the photos, perhaps resembling a movie poster for an action-adventure film like “Mission Impossible,” caught the intruder mid-jump, legs flying, wielding the kitchen knife.

“That picture has gone viral like crazy,” Klee laughed.

Dresser, Klee has learned, has a long criminal history, which makes Klee doubly glad that the man is now behind bars.

“It’s probably good I didn’t know,” he said, though, “I don’t know if I would have changed anything even if I did know prior to it because my goal was just, ‘You can’t do this anymore. I have to stop you.'”

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