Stabbing victim recalls trauma

The victim of the Feb. 15 stabbing on campus has a pretty good idea what she was thinking right after a stranger plunged a knife into her neck.
“How do you live through something like this? How do you get stabbed in the neck? How do you live through this? What if I don’t?” she said.
The UNM student and employee then picked herself up off the sidewalk near the Anthropology Building and walked into her music appreciation class. She asked her classmates for help, and she said they saved her life.

“I remember walking through the door and announcing that I had been stabbed, and my mind senses this lull, this disbelief, where people were asking, ‘Could this person be serious?’” she said. “And then there were floods of people coming down.”

The 41-year-old woman, who preferred to remain anonymous due to security concerns, said doctors told her she was seconds away from death when she collapsed on the classroom floor. If it wasn’t for her classmates, her doctor told her, she would have bled to death.
The assailant’s knife slashed the woman’s neck in two places, coming within a millimeter of her carotid artery. The attack severed her jugular vein, cut a lymph node and damaged neck muscle tissue.

These wounds caused severe internal bleeding, resulting in a collapsed lung.

And almost two months later, her voice is raspy; her neck is limited in its range of motion; and her left eye droops a little bit due to nerve damage.
She has one eight-inch, sutured scar that stretches from her collar bone to underneath her jaw bone and another one under her chin that required 15 stitches.
She is also keeping an eye on a blood clot that resulted from other complications.

“The police reports played down how severe the injuries were,” she said. “A millimeter deeper, a millimeter on either direction, could have been fatal. I guess that’s what’s important to me, that people understand how sick and violent this person is and is still out there.”

The woman spent a week in the hospital; shortly after, when a friend came to visit, she said the psychological weight of the trauma she endured really sank in.
The woman said she’s probably not going back to school this semester to finish her psychology degree, because the prospect of being back on campus after nightfall is worrisome.

“I don’t see myself coming back to class this semester,” she said. “I think it’s a little too late for that. I’ve missed a month and a half, which is a shame because I’m really close to finishing my psychology degree. I am very uncomfortable and scared and anxious about ever being on campus again in the dark.”
Students might have already forgotten about the stabbing, she said, but they need to be aware that campus is not as safe as it seems.

“I can see how this has faded away for people. We don’t want to think about evil, awful people and evil, awful things,” she said.
But the suspect is still out there, she said.

The aggravated assault Around 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 15, the woman was pacing around the entrance to the Anthropology Building while talking on the phone to a friend from out of town.

“I think what’s interesting to me as I reflect back is just how unaware I was,” she said. “And it really strikes me about how unaware so many of us are when we’re on our cell phones or listening to our iPod.”

She said she remembers seeing a man loitering around the entrance to the building. He came across as unusual, she said, because he didn’t go into classroom buildings like other students.

“I do kind of remember a shady, shadowy character sitting on the bench up against the wall, and … my gut tells me that this character was the person,” she said. “In retrospect, I remember thinking, ‘How could you possibly know that or sense that?’ I think, somewhere in my pacing, I remember him still being there, you know — students disappearing and him still being there.”

She paced around that area for about 20 minutes, she said, until her assailant came up from behind her.
“I remember the stab first,” she said. “I remember the total disbelief, like, ‘I can’t believe this. I’ve just been stabbed,’ and then in my mind it was just this slashing and it felt like the person was trying to do a bit more damage to make it sure either I didn’t live through or couldn’t follow him or I couldn’t scream for help.”

She said the man snatched her phone and bolted around the northeast corner of the Anthropology Building, but the man left her large, gray purse laying on the sidewalk.

“I remember screaming for help and seeing him,” she said. “I didn’t get a sense of height or weight or anything at all and then just continued to scream for help.”
When no one responded, she got up and headed into her classroom. She was afraid, she said, that the door would be locked. She remembers being relieved when it wasn’t.
And after she announced to her class that she’d been stabbed, two or three of her classmates rushed to help her, including ASUNM Vice President Mike Westervelt.
“He really seemed to know what to do,” she said. “He was incredibly competent and so calming.”

But she still panicked. She wanted to call her mom in Hatch, her friend from out of town, or her emergency contacts in Albuquerque.
“It occurred to me in that moment that in this day and age, we don’t have numbers memorized, and here my phone had been stolen,” she said. “So, my mantra to everyone is, ‘Make sure you have at least one or two numbers memorized.’”

Then she remembered that she had a personal phone in her purse, with which she called her mother.
The last thing she remembers is being wheeled into the operation room at UNM Hospital, and then she woke up two
days later.

If you have any information regarding the Feb. 15 stabbing, call UNMPD at 277-2241.