http://www.ComputerBob.com/survivors/cb_i_was_assaulted.php
by ComputerBob
June 1, 2008
As long as this story is, it's still a relatively short version of a very, very, very long story.
Many years ago, my wife and I attended a tiny, ethnically diverse church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Over time, we became highly involved in that church. In fact, we moved to a bad part of town in order to live closer to the church and be able to be more involved in its outreach to the bad neighborhood that it was in.
One day, we made friends with a pregnant young Hispanic woman in the church and her 7-year-old daughter. We invited them to come to our apartment for a spaghetti dinner one night and heard her whole story.
She was still married to her second husband at the time, but he had kicked her out of the house when she had refused to abort the baby that she was carrying. She was on an unpaid leave of abscence from her job, and was living in the basement of a couple in the church with her daughter from her first marriage. She had very little money and her husband was in the process of divorcing her.
We told her that she should call us if she ever needed anything.
A couple of months later, at 6:22 AM on the morning of February 9th, our phone rang. Her water had broken and she needed a ride to the hospital to have her baby.
She had no plans for what to do with her 7-year-old while she was in the hospital, so in the car on the way to the hospital, I offered that my wife and I would take care of her while she took care of having the baby.
After leaving her mother at the hospital, I started driving home with the 7-year-old girl. We stopped at a Perkins restaurant and had some pancakes, while she told me how excited she was that she might get a new baby sister.
Within a few minutes, she also told me that:
I was completely shocked. There was a little girl who was so young, yet she already had no hope for a bright future. I decided to try to do whatever I could to help her.
My wife and I started helping our friend raise Sabrina and her baby sister, Anastasia. I took them out for supper every Tuesday night. They stayed overnight at our apartment every Friday night (and usually Saturday night, too.) I took them to worship practice (church band practice) with me every Saturday morning, as well to museums and parks and malls and movies and other fun and educational places during the week. We took them to church every Sunday morning. I helped Sabrina with her homework several times each week. They stayed overnight whenever one of them was sick, and whenever their mother was sick. We made financial arrangements for them to move into an apartment in the same building where we lived, so that the girls could come over whenever they wanted.
For more than 6 years, we treated them like they were our daughters and treated their mother like she was our sister.
Unfortunately, the baby's abusive biological father continued to be an extremely negative part of their lives. I won't go into all the details of everything that he did, but it eventually escalated into felony damage to property and death threats against both his ex-wife and me, because the more my wife and I helped her, the more he directed his hatred of her toward us. Eventually, we helped our friend obtain an Order For Protection against him.
One night, he stalked the two girls and me. After scaring them away to hide between parked cars two blocks away, he tried to beat me to death. I saw his first roundhouse kick coming and backed away as his cowboy boot swung past my face. I don't know what happened after that. But when I woke up, I was face-down on the ground and he was kneeling on my back, punching me in the head with both fists as fast and as hard as he could. He knew that my entire forehead is a plastic plate because of a 1978 accident — that's a whole other story — and he was trying to smash it and kill me.
Unfortunately, as soon as the city prosecutor's office read the police report of the assault, they assumed that there must have been some sort of "love triangle" between my assailant, his ex-wife and me, so they didn't want to prosecute him for his crime. It took me a whole month of telephone calls and letters to finally convince them that there was no love triangle, and that they needed to press charges against him.
I have seriously considered ending my own life on two different occasions. One of them was during the year that I waited for that case to go to trial.
It felt like was completely alone. Like no one understood what I was going through but everyone thought that they needed to give me advice anyway.
A "Christian counselor" that I met with told me that I should get a "carry permit" so that if my assailant ever threatened me again, I could "blow him away."
Half of my friends told me things like, "You should have fought back" -- totally ignoring the fact that my assailant was a foot taller than me and an experienced street fighter. Everyone else told me things like "You should drop the criminal charges and let the Holy Spirit convict him of his sins."
Yeah, there's nothing like trying to make a victim feel guilty for wanting to hold a ciminal accountable for his crimes.
It took a whole year for the case to go to trial. During that year, my assailant repeatedly called me at 1 or 2 in the morning, just to wake me up and then silently hang up -- afterward, I'd be filled with adrenaline and unable to sleep.
My wife and I and the girls and their mother all moved to a very expensive high-security apartment building in downtown St. Paul — the kind where you can't get in unless you're a resident or authorized guest. And my wife and I changed our telephone number.
I won't go into the details of his trial except to say that the jury almost immediately convicted him of two separate crimes.
A few weeks later, he didn't bother to show up for his sentencing, so it had to be rescheduled. When he was finally sentenced, he was sentenced to 6 months in jail and was ordered to pay thousands of dollars of restitution to me and to my health insurance provider.
Due to Minnesota's extremely liberal criminal justice system, he ended up spending a total of only 14 nights in jail — they even let him out of jail to go to work every day. Of the thousands of dollars of restitution that he was supposed to pay me, he paid me a total of only $110 — and it took him over a year to do that. He never paid a penny to my insurance provider.
In the meantime, I had thousands of dollars of lost wages and medical bills, permanent injuries, and post traumatic stress disorder that still occasionally returns and causes me to stop breathing when I'm in a crowd -- and I don't even realize it until I get dizzy and start to pass out.
If I had the chance to do it all again, would I? Yes, I would, because I know that I did the right thing with those girls and their mother, and I also know that I did the right thing to press charges against my assailant — even though he ended up getting away without much punishment at all.
So what ever happened to him? He was several years younger than me, but in June of 2005, all alone at his cabin in northern Minnesota, he suddenly died of a massive heart attack.