Everything had to work perfectly. More than 400 law enforcement were ready. Moving trucks were rented, driven into a church parking lot. The operation would start early in the morning, and all those people would need breakfast. The mayor at the time, Jim Haggerton, could hardly stand the wait. “The people at the city kept pulling me back, 'Jim, don’t get in too big a hurry, don’t get in too big a hurry, because there’s more going on,'” he recalled. Jenny Durkan, the U.S. attorney at the time — now Seattle's mayor — was building a case against the motel owners. The Tukwila police wanted more time. But public pressure to do something had grown too strong. Those motels had been dragging Tukwila down since the 1980s when the Green River Killer picked up young sex workers to murder. Residents of Tukwila had grown tired of waiting and started electing people into office who promised to clean up the boulevard.

Tukwila responded with the largest pre-planned law enforcement event in Washington state history. “A lot of people at the city didn’t have any idea this was going to happen until the 99th hour,” said Haggerton. Even he wasn't allowed to see all the details. The raid At 3:30 a.m. on an August morning, police officers disguised as road workers closed off a highway lane. At 6:00, a caravan of moving trucks and police cars snaked along the road and pulled up in front of three separate motels: the Boulevard Motel, the Traveler's Choice Motel and the Great Bear Motor Inn. Tukwila police officer Zack Anderson remembers what it looked like when the truck doors opened: “The sheer amount of people flooding out of the backs of those box trucks. It was like a tactical clown car, with cops after cops after cops coming out of the back of these trucks,” he said.

Officers methodically knocked on every door, gathering evidence and serving warrants. “There was no place for them to go because those motels were one way in, one way out. So they would have had to have waded through about 50 police officers if they were going to try and leave,” said Doug Johnson, one of the cops who organized the raid. They let the sex workers go because they were after the management. Twenty-two people were arrested, including the motel owners, whose meticulous records of criminal activities were seized in the raid. "You know, that was emotional for me," said Haggerton, referring to the raid. "It was just the fact that it was so long overdue – and all of the stress that those businesses had put onto people.”

Green River Killer Beyond the spectacle of the raid were countless hours of undercover work and a shift in police tactics that launched Tukwila out of its crime-ridden past and into the future. To understand what changed, let’s recall this stretch of highway during the days of Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer. Ridgeway was in his second decade of killing young women and teens in the 1990s, when Doug Johnson first enlisted with Tukwila Police as a young cop. Johnson says violence was just a part of life on that strip. “When you’re a young officer, maybe that’s, 'Gosh, I work a tough area,'" said Johnson. "After you’ve been there about 10 years, and you’re still going to a lot of high volume dangerous crimes, you’re like, ‘Hmm, I don’t seem to be making an impact.’”

Johnson and other cops were often called to the three motels. They didn’t realize then that the motel owners were using them. Somali refugee Mohammed Jama ran a store right next to the motels. Hear how the raid changed his life on KUOW. Here’s how it worked: The motel owners protected the drug dealers and sex workers from the police. When cops came knocking, the motel owners misdirected them. In return, the motels expected protection money. Those who couldn’t pay went deep into debt to the motel. “They treated the prostitutes essentially like indentured servants,” Johnson said. When the women couldn’t pay, the motel reported them to the police. The police would cart her off, and the motel owners would then raid her room, steal her money and belongings. Later, they’d ransom her stuff back to her.