CBS2 Exclusive: Woman Speaks After Being Slashed While Walking Down Queens Street
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- There were heartfelt and compelling words Monday night from the victim of an unthinkable slashing over the weekend.
Vannesa Echeverry, 19, was slashed while walking to her car in Queens on Sunday. She spoke exclusively to CBS2's Scott Rapoport in her first television interview.
The nasty gash on her leg only begins to tell the story of Echeverry's frightening attack when she was slashed by a stranger in broad daylight.
"I was honestly very shocked," she said.
Echeverry, a student from East Elmhurst, told CBS2's Rapoport about her terrifying ordeal on Sunday morning as she was walking to her car at 25th Avenue and 79th Street near Our Lady of Fatima Church.
She said out of nowhere, a jogger came up behind her, brushed up against her, and sliced her thigh open with an unknown object. The jogger then kept on running, Echeverry said.
"All of the sudden, he starts sprinting past me and I feel a pain in my leg, and I looked down and I was bleeding," she said.
But perhaps worse than anything, there is that nagging question she keeps asking herself.
"I honestly just want to know why he did it," Echeverry said.
She said the man did not say anything to her and she never really got a good look at him. She described him only as wearing a gray hoodie, black shorts and sneakers.
Echeverry told CBS2's Rapoport she is very much aware of the recent spate of slashings in the city and finds it troubling.
"That means that they don't think there are enough repercussions; that they don't think they are going to get caught," she said. "So there needs to be something done about this."
But she told CBS2's Rapoport she refuses to live her life afraid.
"I'm not going to let this stop me from going work, going to school, like, enjoying my life," Echeverry said.
But Echeverry did say she is going try to be much more aware of her surroundings.
Echeverry is studying criminology at St. John's and hopes to one day to be a police detective.