Assault
On April 19, 1989, the slightly-built 28-year-old investment banker was violently assaulted while jogging in New York City's Central Park. She was raped and beaten almost to death. When found about four hours later, she was suffering from severe hypothermia and blood loss from multiple lacerations and internal bleeding, and her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was removed from the socket. The initial medical prognosis was that she would die or, at best, remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries. Remarkably, she largely recovered, with some lingering disabilities related to balance and loss of vision. As a result of the severe trauma, she had no memory of the attack or of any events up to an hour preceding the assault.
The crime, one of 3,254 rapes reported in New York City that year, was unique in the level of public outrage it provoked. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post, "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm."
Read more about this topic: Central Park Jogger Case
Famous quotes containing the word assault:
“To assault the total culture totally is to be free to use all the fruits of mankind’s wisdom and experience without the rotten structure in which these glories are encased and encrusted.”
—Judith Malina (b. 1926)
“[Humanity] has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“This teaching is not practical in the sense in which the New Testament is. It is not always sound sense in practice. The Brahman never proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out. His active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of caste, of impassable limits of destiny and the tyranny of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)