“Common” decency, privacy issues, and propriety allow me to relate the following:
The time that followed was basically an onslaught on her core human spirit.
...Experiencing a deeper humiliation than words can describe.
absolute.
totally and completely helpless.
"i thought i was going to be dead.
and i saw myself laying there dead, my family and friends finding me..
She wanted to live.
After
she was alone,
she was still Gripped by Fear.
The sun was just coming up as she left her apartment to find help.
Jess stated, “It was the weirdest thing, here was this Beautiful Morning, it was kind of light out—but the world was different.”
Jess drove to some friends’ house near the K-State Campus. She rang the bell and pounded on the door and windows to try to wake the two women inside, but no one answered. (Jess later found out that, not knowing who was banging at their door they became afraid and dialed 911.)
She was frantic as she drove to another friend’s apartment, where she knew the door would not be locked. When the doorknob turned in her hand, a huge wave of relief washed over her. She woke her friend, who hugged her, called the police, and stayed with her through the day.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of the ordeal for Jess was the effect on her parents. “When I went to the hospital, the police officer there asked if I wanted to call my mom.
I said I just couldn’t,
so she called my mom, and my mom and dad drove up here.” Jess tries to hold back tears when she describes her parents’ pain. “It was so sad to see my mom so upset. I knew they were hurting for me but I was hurting for them.”
Her parents drove her back to Wichita, and her sister took off work and came home from Kansas City. “I couldn’t talk to my brother about it, but he was there for me. My mom stayed home from work, we went out to eat, talked about it, we tried to figure out what I was going to do. They didn’t want me to ever come back here, and of course I was in summer school, I didn’t know what to.”
Jess remembered, “I didn’t go to school at all that first week, I e-mailed my teachers and got all my homework. When I told my parents I wanted to come back to Manhattan they couldn’t understand it.
My mother was so sad and confused. My dad finally understood; he told me he was so proud of how I’d handled it. I explained that I didn’t want this event to define me—For everyone to know for the rest of my life that in my senior year, with just one year left, I dropped out because of this random thing that happed to me.
“I didn’t want to throw away my life because of him.”
Besides wanting to return to K-State to pursue her academic goals, Jess also found it comforting to be with her friends, and in some ways found it easier to talk to them about the assault. “Talking to my parents, I could see how sad they were, it hurt me to see them. My dad—he’s really protective of us kids—like, my sister had just moved to Kansas City by herself two weeks before this happened—he went up there, helped her get an apartment, he wouldn’t let her get an apartment without an alarm…. he had checked out my apartment too—we thought it was safe…”
While she considers the effect of the assault on her family to be the worst part of the ordeal, she realizes she has been profoundly affected on the deepest levels.
When One Year had passed after the assault, Jess quietly described a black part in her heart as “never-ending. It’s a part of me that hurts.” She asked pensively, “I wonder, is this going to be a part of my life every day? I think about it every day, it pops into my head every hour. Is this ever going to go away? Or will it be with me the rest of my life? I’ll just be watching a movie, and it pops into my head…I have this on my shoulders. I wish I could relax again… I go out and have fun, but I’m not like my friends. It’s in the back of my head. Except for my closest friends, I wonder if the rest all think that I don’t think about it any more, they don’t realize it’s part of my everyday life still.”
These feelings she described are not unusual for traumatic crime victims one year after the crime.
The Aftermath: http://marysbeagooddogblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/jesss-story-part-5-aftermath-part-1.html
Are they ever gonna catch this guy?
ReplyDeleteBy They you mean the police.
ReplyDeleteHe has already caught himself-- that is, he knows what he does hurts people, and has chosen to keep doing it. at some point that is hard to live with, if you are an intelligent person. i hope he allows the honorable part of himself to step up, get right while he has the time before his universal justice. teach those who have not caught him his ways, to help make amends for the anguish he has caused.