Woman Escapes From Storage Unit After Boyfriend Stabs Her Multiple Times

[bloodrayne]

A Wounded Woman Fights For Survival In Storage Unit

Richmond, Virginia - She lay face-down with a plastic bag over her mouth in the domestic clutter of a cramped, dark, 6-by-6-foot public storage unit weak, battered and bleeding from more than two dozen stab wounds to her head, back and face.

Her lung was punctured, making breathing difficult. A vertebra in her back was cracked. A cut just below her left eye blurred her vision.

But the young woman knew things were going to get worse.

"You're going to die slowly and painfully," the woman said her boyfriend told her moments before he shut her inside the Public Storage unit at 5440 Midlothian Turnpike in South Richmond, ostensibly to go to work for the day.

"I'm going to come back over here and finish you off."

Instead, the slender, 18-year-old former track athlete at Atlantic City High School in New Jersey summoned enough strength to kick a hole through a plywood wall into an adjoining storage unit.

Then she climbed to the top of a pile of boxes in that space and broke a hole through the wall above the unit's gate. First, however, she used her own blood to write the name of her alleged attacker on the wall of the adjoining unit.

Suspending herself from an overhanging pipe, she squeezed out of the unit and dropped to the floor, crawling to freedom outside the barracks-style storage building where she was discovered by another woman using the facility and the manager of the complex.

"She's a very strong young lady," said Lt. Brian Russell of the Richmond Police Department's Major Crimes Division.

A suspect, Kip Burns, 23, of Bailey Woods Drive in Midlothian, was arrested on New Year's Eve in Lumberton, N.C., after police responded to a neighbor's call of a suspicious person in a vehicle.

Richmond police charged Burns with abduction and malicious wounding in the Dec. 30 attack.

The woman, who requested that her name be withheld, discussed her harrowing ordeal in an interview with The Times-Dispatch in her hospital room at VCU Medical Center, where she spent six days recovering from her injuries.

Comforted bedside by her mother and younger sister, the victim wore a blue Lycra wrap around her head, covering the stitches and bandages and surgical staples from her wounds. Plastic tubes pumped fresh oxygen through her nose.

One of the woman's front teeth is broken. And a dark half-moon-shaped bruise resides just below her bloodshot eye, which was narrowly missed by the attacker's knife blade.

"I thought, 'I can't die, I've got two people to live for -- my mom and my sister,'" the woman recalled in a hoarse voice, sitting upright in her bed. "I just kept thinking about them getting that phone call."

The attack was unexpected, according to the victim, who said her boyfriend previously had not hit her or yelled at her.

She said she met the man at a Shockoe Bottom nightclub last summer during a visit, and decided to move to Richmond in September. Her plan was to share an apartment with him and work to make enough money to attend Virginia Commonwealth University. She hopes eventually to go to medical school.

She got a job as a pharmacy technician at a Walgreens in Chesterfield County. The boyfriend, she said, worked as a maintenance man at a fitness center. The couple decided to move to a new apartment and had rented a storage unit to hold their belongings until their move.

The woman said the attack sprang from a minor argument that escalated when she suggested that she was going to move out. The woman said that she wasn't really serious, but her boyfriend took it that way.

"'So you're really going to leave, you're going to turn your back on me?'" the boyfriend said, according to the woman. "I looked up at him and he had this mean face. He took out the knife," she added, describing what she believed to be a paring knife.

"I tried to run but he pulled me back in," she said. "He just started stabbing in my head, and then he gets me on the floor and starts stabbing in the back," said the woman, who said she was wearing a jacket.

She said she started to yell for help.

"'You ain't going nowhere,'" she said the boyfriend told her. "'Nobody can hear you. This is storage.'"

The woman said her boyfriend started to choke her, while saying, "'I loved you, I loved you. We were going to be together. Why did you make me do it?'"

The woman said when she got up, the man stabbed her again, saying "'Why won't you die?'"

The woman said she decided that the only way to survive was to fall back down and act as if she were dead.

"I thought if I had got up, I would be dead," she said.

By that time, the woman said, her wounds started to affect her. An anemic, she said she began to feel weak and could smell her own blood. Her feet began to feel cold and lose sensation.

She said her boyfriend kicked her several times around her stomach, and placed a plastic bag over her mouth and nose, which she surreptitiously loosened so she could take a breath.

She said at one point the man got on his knees and prayed for forgiveness. She said he picked her up -- "I made myself like a rag doll" -- and placed her head-first into a pile of clothing in the unit, saying that her death would be slow and painful, and that he would come back to "'finish you off.'"

The woman said she waited until she heard the man's car pull out of the lot before she began moving and yelling for help. She said she tried to climb out of her unit but could not budge the gate.

She started to get sleepy. She began praying to God and to her grandmother.

"I thought, 'I can't die like this,'" the woman said. "'I'm supposed to have kids and get married and have a real life.'"

She took off her hooded sweatshirt, exposing her upper body, and wrapped it around her bleeding head. Then she turned toward the side of the unit and began kicking the wall with all her might, finally creating an opening in the quarter-inch plywood separating her unit from the next unit.

The woman said she crawled through the opening into a unit piled high with items. She began to feel weak again, and worried that she would die in the other unit without anyone knowing how it happened. She removed her blood-soaked sweatshirt and used her blood to fingerpaint the boyfriend's first name on the unit's wall.

The woman said she climbed to the top of the pile of items, slid through a hole she punched above the unit's gate, and landed in an indoor common area in the storage building.

After she crawled out and was spotted, police rushed to the scene and she was whisked to VCU Medical Center.

"Am I going to die?" she asked a woman at the scene.

"No, baby," came the reply. "You're not gonna die."

Doctors told her that no vital organs were damaged, with the exception of a punctured lung.

But the victim did more than survive. She provided Richmond police Detective Rick Edwards with critical information that led to an arrest in less than 24 hours.

She was released from the hospital yesterday morning. She said she plans to go back to work and continue her dream of finishing school and becoming a doctor.

As for the suspect, she said:

"I won. He's in jail. And I'm living."

[Vodstok]

reminds me, my wife was watching the first season of Grey's Anatomy yesterday (she borrowed it from a friend) and there was an episode where a girl was brought in beat to hell. Turne dout a guy tried to rape her and had beat the living shit out of her, but they found something interesting in her mouth: his penis.


Eventually the guy ends up in the same hospital, never to get his guy back because it is now police evidence.

By the end of the show, patrick Dempsey goes into the guy's room and slaps the side of his bed to startke him awake. he looks at the guy's chart and says "I have good news and bad news. the good news is you are going to live. The bad news is you cant have your penis back, the cops have. have a nice life."

the guy gets ready to say something, but when he tries to raise his hand, its cuffed to the bed :)

[newb]

They just don't make them storage units like they used to.Back in my day when we put someone in one....they stayed there.

Nice story of love and betrayal