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Sarah Marshlene
Habakangas, 17 -- As
a young girl, she followed her mother, Victoria, everywhere.
Spring of
1991, she left her mother and stepfather in Virginia and moved to
SeaTac to live with her sister.
In SeaTac,
Sarah started walking the streets and was traveling with a pimp
to Portland and California.
"She would
call me from all of these places," her mother recalled. She
actually spoke to the man with her daughter. "I told him I didn't
want my daughter hurt. He said she'd be all right."
"Sarah never
had a bad bone in her body and she had her own mind," Victoria said
weeping. "She never felt fear because she figured she'd never done
anything to anyone else. "She was just somebody who got picked up
with some bad people," her mother said.
"She said,
'Mom, don't worry about me. Nobody's going to hurt me.'"
November
1991, her body was found strangled, her hands and feet tied, near
North Bend, where her friend, Nicole French,
19, was strangled.
Not a single
day passes in which Melissa Habakangas doesn't think of her sister.
"If God would give my sister back, I would let him take me. She
was cheated out of her life."
Detectives
are reexamining Habakangas' slaying to see if there are ties to
the Green River case. Victoria and her daughter, Melissa, hope for
a break in the case, which could help close wounds that are 10 years
old. "I keep hoping that the truth will come out," said Victoria.
"But in my heart, I don't believe it will happen."
Sarah's
sister, Melissa Habakangas, maintains she was almost killed by a
man matching Ridgway's description. She says the man tried to strangle
her in the 1980s after she refused to have sex with him. "I managed
to get out of the truck," Habakangas said, "but he chased me." The
man told her she was going to die. Police could not be reached to
confirm Melissa Habakangas's account, and her mother seemed dubious.
1 of 38 victims
not previously investigated as Green River victims now being investigated
in relationship with the Green River Crimes.
Copyright Kari Sable Burns 1994-2006
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