LangleyAdvance
On the move pg A4
Your community newspaper since 1931
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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Warning: this article contains disturbing and graphic details of a sexual assault that occurred in Langley. by Heather Colpitts hcolpitts@langleyadvance.com
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Jessica, a married mother of one, took her cellphone and set out for a walk on Aug. 25, around dusk. “I didn’t take my purse on purpose,” she said, recalling how she thought it would be safer. Near R.C. Garnett School, the 30-year-old didn’t think anything of it when she heard what sounded like footsteps. “Footsteps – then I felt something hit my head,” and that, she said, is all she remembered. When she started to awaken, she felt pain all over her body. “I was in blackberry bushes, with my clothes ripped and my shoes were gone,” Jessica said. Jessica tried sitting up, but fell back down. She called 911. “They were trying to figure out where I was,” she explained. Jessica said she thought she heard voices, and started to crawl towards them.
Victim hopes sharing will help to protect others Jessica (not her real name) knows that it’s unlikely her attacker or attackers will be caught. Because she was attacked from behind and rendered unconscious, she has no description. Despite the turmoil it has brought to her life, one thought kept coming to the forefront. “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Jessica
said. That’s why she agreed to sit down with the Langley Advance and discuss what happened to her, so that the community knows it took place, and that whomever did it to her is still out there. She noted that there has also been a recent murder of a teen, and other attacks on women in Delta.
The voice at 911 told her to call out. A woman and man were walking down the street and saw her. “The girl said ‘Oh, my God’ and came over,” Jessica recounted. She thinks a motorist also stopped to help. Emergency personnel started arriving to help the concussed, bruised, and battered woman. In the ambulance, the BC Ambulance paramedic treating her asked where she hurt on her body. Everywhere. The crashing realization hit her: she had been sexually assaulted.
She feels that letting people know about incidents will help them to better protect themselves. She’s particularly concerned that her sexual assault took place near an elementary school, and that R.E. Mountain Secondary is also nearby. “It’s the mother part,” she commented. “You worry about kids.”
“I was absolutely horrified,” she said. At the hospital, Jessica and her family were asked to give permission for a forensic nurse to examine her, because a sex crime was involved. Since the sexual assault, she’s found the treatment by the legal system difficult. She spent two hours in a police interview room, being asked deeply personal questions. While she understands why it’s done like that, in the name of thoroughness of the investigation, it doesn’t make the experience any easier to go through.
continued on page A7…