A Sexual Assault Victim's Journey to Freedom

No one knew when Jane Doe walked to the house why she was crying or where she had come from. Family members had been sitting outside all of the evening, enjoying the springtime Jersey breeze off the Atlantic Ocean. So when this young woman, whose clothing looked stretched and disheveled, walked up asking for help, everyone knew that something was terribly wrong.

Whilst no one saw exactly where she came from, a visitor spotted her walking up the street almost pleading for her life with every step as she searched in the dawning darkness of the night for someone to help her in a place that she had never been, in a circumstance she had never imagined.

Some four hours earlier, she was an innocent twenty-something sitting at a bus stop in Voorhees trying to get to Philadelphia to visit her sister. She must have had the look of someone who was naïve because a man drove up to where she was standing and offered her a ride. She being naïve, innocent and overly trusting took the man up on his offer. What she did not know was that this man's intentions had nothing to do with driving her to the City of Brotherly Love and everything to do with taking her to his undisclosed house of horrors and sexually assaulting her.

Immediately after getting into the black SUV the young woman knew she had made a mistake and began to fear for her life. The assailant did not have to tell her what his intentions were, she knew. She was in trouble and needed to get away. He wanted her body for his playground.

Forty miles or so away from Voorhees, and now in Salem County, having passed Philadelphia by, the young woman found herself outside a deserted, white house. She had tried escaping from the SUV but to no avail. This was her last chance at hope. If she made it inside the fact was there was no guarantee that she would ever make it out. He intended to rape her, to violate her body. So with one fling of desperation the woman grabbed at the man, knocking his glasses off and began to make her escape.

But where do you escape to when you have never been where you are? There were no gas stations, no street lights, just a dark, dingy road with houses separated by land and nothing else. She knocked on one door but no one answered. She looked at another but no lights were on. What was she supposed to do? Had her attacker found his glasses? Was his sexual attack about to find its victim again? She had no way of knowing.

With fear streaming down her body and tears streaming down her face, this young, courageous woman kept on walking until she walked up to a house filled with people with the same skin color as her attacker, who did not know her and had no idea of what had happened to her. Did she have the courage to ask for help? Did they have the heart to offer her whatever she needed? She would soon find out.

One minute after walking up and asking for help, the young woman was embraced by a family that didn't care about anything but her safety. She was a victim of a sexual attack even though her assailant never penetrated her. Whoever she involves herself with will have to deal with the reality that she has been traumatized and broken in her soul by someone who meant to rape her body and break her soul.

But she was not alone. While the young woman talked to her mom in the living room of the family the cops arrived, took her statement and began to put the pieces together of what had happened at the deserted, white house around the corner. A few days later, a black man, missing his glasses was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting, not one, not two but three women.