Day 289: A Night Of Terror

Something horrible happened tonight, and it is a night that I will remember vividly for as long as I live.

I was in Kyobo Books with Meghann just cruising around when I received a very distressing phone call. It was a call from my co-workers Kelly and Mike, who were at home in Ilsan and asking me to come to their place immediately. There was an urgency in their voices but they seemed reluctant to tell me what the emergency was over the phone... I kept asking "is everything okay?" and then they finally told me....

A stranger had broken into Katie's apartment and had attacked her, and she was hiding out with them.

OH MY GOD! HOLY FUCK!

I left Kyobo immediately and caught a bus straight back to Ilsan, fearing the worst all along the way. I was so scared and so worried for my dear friend. What the fuck had happened?

When I got to their apartment Katie was there along with Jeremy (her ex-boyfriend), Addie, and two of our bosses. The police arrived shortly after and I sat in and listened to Katie's recount of her night of terror.

Apparently Katie had got home to her apartment around 5pm and had decided to take out the garbage. When she left her apartment she accidentally bumped into a man who was running up the stairs in her building. She thought nothing of it at the time. She brought her trash down to the curb and went right back to her apartment. She went inside and went online onto Messenger to talk with some friends. After a little while she had to use the bathroom.

And when she went into her bathroom she was horrified to discover a strange man hiding in there waiting to attack her. He grabbed her neck and began to strangle her. She tried to scream and fight him off but he was too strong and she couldn't catch her breath to scream. He pushed her onto her bed and began to make sexual advances...

Suddenly he stopped and began apologizing to her, feeling very sorry and remorseful and asking for her forgiveness. Realizing that he was mentally unstable, she tried to calm him down and then persuade him to leave. This proved to be useless, as a few minutes later he became aggressive again and once again attacked and strangled her.

This back and forth between remorse and apologies, and aggression and strangulation went on for the next *hour and a half.* He refused to leave and became very angry and violent every time she tried to make her way to the door, and she was literally a prisoner in her own apartment with this terrifying psycho.

When he attacked her again she decided that she had had enough and was going to fight back with all that she had. She's a very small girl and he was rather strong, but she grabbed her keys and jammed them into his neck. The keys did not puncture the skin and instead just made him more angry and violent. She tried to scream but again because he was strangling her she could not. Somehow she managed to escape him for a brief second and ran out of her apartment screaming. Mike and Kelly live right next to her, and thank god not only were they home but their door was unlocked. She ran into their apartmet in hysterics while the strange man took off.

119 (in Korea it's the opposite of home) does not speak English, so they phoned our bosses in panic. And shortly after that is when they had phoned me...

I was so happy to see that Katie was okay (ie: not dead and not raped) but was horrified to see her neck. Her neck was totally red and all scratched up and bruised with these massive RED lines where he had tried to strangle her. She was completely shaken up and still terrified that he would come back. It was so, so, so horrible to see my good friend like that and feeling like there was nothing I could do to help her.

When the police arrived she had to tell them the *full story*, piece by piece, and I tell ya, sitting there on her bed (where it had happened), listening to her painfully give every detail to the police, and seeing her breaking down several times in fear, is a sight that I will always have with me in my memory. It's an image I won't ever forget, to see my friend so hurt and so scared.

Now this is all especially surprising since violent crime in Korea is very rare. It's just not in the culture here like it is in Western culture. Theft is common here, but home invasions and attacks are extremely uncommon. Hell, unless you're leaving for a while most people don't even bother to lock their apartments! I mean every single time I've ever gone to take out my trash I've never locked my door. You're only gone for a minute, and like I said, there's normally never any fear about this kind of stuff. Seoul is a surprisingly very safe city, for both locals and foreigners. But I'll never leave my apartment unlocked ever again, even if it is just for thirty seconds.

Unfortunately the police here are a complete joke. They don't know what they're doing and hardly even seem to care. Hell they didn't even check for any fingerprints in her apartment, nor did they question neighbours to see if they had seen or heard anything. And I hate to sound discriminatory, but I've always heard that the concerns of foreigners are far, far down on the list of their priorities here. They'll probably never catch this freak, even if they were to bother looking for him. Fucking useless bastards.

Again, I feel so helpless and it makes me mad. I just want Katie to be safe and to be happy again, and I don't know how to help. She's homeless in the meantime and staying with church friends until she gets a new apartment. But I know that this traumatic experience is going to be hard for her, as it would for anyone, and that she will probably be very scared for a long time. Poor Katie. What a horrible, terrifying experience to go through. It's like a horror movie come to life. I'm just thankful that things didn't go...worse....than what they did. The outcome of this story could have had an even more tragic ending, and I'm so glad that we still have Katie with us.