Seattle, Wash., Dec. 5, 2025. Jeanette Marken, 75, was picking up a food order to deliver when a man came up behind her at Third Avenue and James Street, just outside the King County Courthouse. Police say he swung a wooden board with a metal screw driven through one end into her face, using both hands. The blow tore into her right eye. Doctors gave her only about a ten percent chance of ever recovering her sight, and the same blow shattered her nose and cheekbone.
There was no history between Marken and the man charged in her attack, 42-year-old Fale Vaigalepa Pea, and no discernible reason he chose her. She was a stranger on a public sidewalk, doing her job, when Pea allegedly walked up behind her and struck her without provocation. Yet the officers who responded already knew exactly who Pea was.
Body camera footage shows two Seattle police officers recognizing the suspect the moment they arrived. “Is that Fale Pea?” one asked. “Oh, he’s notorious for random assaults on Third,” the other said, using the local name for Third Avenue, where Pea had a long, documented history of unprovoked attacks. Pea was homeless, and witnesses said they recognized him from a shelter on the same block. As paramedics loaded Marken onto a stretcher, an officer told an EMT that Pea “usually punches.” That day, he said, Pea had escalated things far worse than usual. Officers knew Pea well enough to describe his violence in casual, routine terms, and that is exactly the problem: a man capable of gouging out a stranger’s eye was, to the police who dealt with him regularly, just a guy who punches people. Footage of the attack and the officers’ reaction is available here: watch the video.
This was not Pea’s first act of violence. In 2011, he stabbed two people at a party in SeaTac, one of them eight times. A jury convicted him of second-degree assault the following year. For a knife attack that came within inches of killing someone, the court sentenced Pea to eighteen months of community custody: supervision, not confinement. Had Washington’s courts imposed real prison time instead, Pea would have been behind bars, not free to spend the next decade terrorizing ordinary people trying to go about their day.
He did not stay quiet. Seattle courts convicted him of misdemeanor assault in 2020, four more times in 2023, and again in 2024. In 2025 alone, King County jail booked him eight times on charges including assault, unlawful weapons possession, indecent exposure, drug offenses, and malicious mischief. None of it kept him off the street. That August, a competency evaluation found Pea unfit to stand trial, and the courts dismissed the pending assault cases against him instead of pursuing treatment or civil commitment. He walked free. Four months later, he blinded Jeanette Marken.
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which handles felony cases, says it has charged every violent felony referred to it involving Pea over the past decade and a half. By that account, the 2012 stabbing conviction and the current case are the only two. That claim may be true, and it changes nothing, because the real failure sits with a sentencing court that treated a knife attack as worthy of supervision instead of confinement, and a competency system that dismissed case after case instead of removing a known danger from downtown Seattle. It is both absurd and tragic that a man officers called notorious could cycle through jail eight times in a single year, steps from the courthouse built to hold him accountable, and still be free to maim a stranger in broad daylight. Pea remains held in the King County Jail on one million dollars bail, awaiting trial on the first-degree assault charge that could finally send him to prison for years, not months.
“This attack was barbaric, and it is absurd that a man police described as someone who merely ‘usually punches’ was released again and again until he blinded a stranger,” said Evan Doerr, Founder and Executive Director of the Preventable Crime Project. “The system knew exactly who Fale Pea was, and it turned him loose anyway.”
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