Online hoax fuels trashing of Tacoma house

Everything including the kitchen sink was stripped from a home after an Internet classified ad invited people to take whatever they wanted for free.

Now, while the owner of the picked-apart house seeks answers, Tacoma police say the case is so unusual that they're not sure how it will be investigated or prosecuted.



The free-for-all took on new life late last week, Raye said, when someone posted an ad on craigslist.org, a popular online classifieds listing, that invited people to come inside the unlocked home and take anything they wanted.

The ad was pulled quickly, she said, but was up long enough that scavengers stripped the house of its light fixtures, front door, vinyl windows, water heater and even the kitchen sink.



The blue house in the 1200 block of East 64th Street is owned by Laurie Raye; she bought it in 2001 from her mother, who continued to live in it until moving recently to a nursing home, where she died.

Raye said she is not sure who posted the ad. She said craigslist officials provided her Thursday with the e-mail address and IP address -- which is used to identify computers connected to a network -- of the person who posted it, and she passed both along to police. She said she didn't recognize the e-mail address.