OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — A woman breaks her silence about becoming the victim of an alleged sexual assault by a nurse at a metro hospital.
Dennis Clark is charged with sexually assaulting four patients at Providence Medical Center, while he was a nurse in surgical recovery.
Overland Park police reopened cases involving Clark and similar accusations when he worked as a nurse at Menorah Medical Center.
Last week, Johnson County prosecutors charged him with seven new crimes.
On Wednesday FOX 4’s Shannon O’Brien spoke to a woman who says Clark assaulted her. The victim told FOX 4 it has taken her a while to build up the courage to reach out and tell her story. WDAF has agreed to hide her identity, because she is having a hard time coming to grips with what she says happened to her.
A sexual assault when she was most vulnerable, in what is supposed to be a safe place.
“I am terrified to be by myself, and I am terrified to go to sleep, and when I go to sleep, I have nightmares so bad,” said the woman. “And sometimes they are just flashbacks over and over again.”
The woman says her life stopped about a year ago, after she had surgery at Providence Medical Center.
“Before I am even all the way conscious, a male nurse comes in with a wheel chair and says, ‘hey, I am going to take you into this bathroom. We are going to get you changed so you can go home,’” recalled the woman.
Still groggy from the anesthetic, she says Clark loaded her into a wheel chair, took her into the bathroom, closed the door, blocking it with the wheel chair then stripped her naked.
“And then he says I have got to see your incisions from behind, so he bent me over,” she said.
And that is when this victim says Dennis Clark sexually assaulted her.
“I am thinking ‘what is going on?’ and I for some reason, I mean, that is all I could think is ‘what is going on here?’ and then right then, thank God, the charge nurse of the recovery, of the surgical recovery walked in and I remember her screaming ‘what are you doing?’” recalled the woman. “And that is when I realized, ‘this is really happening’ and I screamed. I couldn’t even form words. All I could do is just scream. At that point, I turn around and he runs out of the room.”
The woman says not only did Clark sexually assault her, but injured her in the process, causing her to have to be rushed back into surgery.
“And when he bent me over trying to rape me, he had collapsed one of my, the major artery on the left side,” said the alleged victim. “I was really wagering on bleeding to death, rather than having them put me back under anesthetic and going back to surgery again. I was terrified.”
The terror re-lived when she realized there were other victims before her, at Menorah Medical Center.
Four sexual assault victims there and three neighbors who say Clark exposed himself to them.
“I mean, he didn’t have one or two complaints, he had a lot of complaints before me,” said the woman. “All this stuff and nobody listened to these women?”
One of the things this victim is having a difficult time with is she feels that the system failed. She said Dennis Clark should have been stopped years before the incidents at providence medical center.
