KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Kansas City woman attacked along a section of the Trolley Trail is reliving the nightmare that has changed her life.
“He must’ve followed me. When I felt him grab me, he was running behind me,” says the 22-year-old Kansas City college student, who three weeks ago, says an unarmed man attacked her in broad daylight.
The woman says it happened one afternoon after she got off a Metro bus and walked alone along a section of the Trolley Trail near 85th and Troost.
“He had me down pretty hard,” she said. “It felt like a lifetime. I felt like I was going to die. I really felt like he was going to kill me.”
The woman’s attacker is still on the streets.
“He did like a bear hug, so you know kind of like a bear hug, so I couldn’t escape. I was kicking my legs, but he grabbed my arms, so that I couldn’t like bear out and get away,” she says.
“This lasted not even more than five or 10 minutes,” adds the young victim.
After a terrifying few minutes, the attacker took off on foot. The woman, bruised on her left arm and left thigh, her lip bleeding, ran to a nearby tattoo shop and called 911 as workers there comforted here until police arrived.
“About a week after the attack, I was afraid to be alone. I’d stay in my bedroom with a baseball bat, afraid to leave the house. Now, I no longer worry and I’m no longer afraid to be by myself,” the woman says. “I kept fighting him, kept screaming, kept thinking about my mom and my dad. I was determined to not let him win and stop me from graduating and getting my degree next spring.”
In the meantime, as she tries to put the “scare of her life” behind her, the theatre major says she’s now working on another way to get to and from school because as of September 30, the Metro bus she normally rides to a local university will be eliminated due to low ridership.
Kansas City police do have a vague description of the woman’s attacker.
