Seattle Woman Uses Tactics She Learned from Self-Defense Class to Escape Brutal Sexual Assault
Kelly Herron was jogging in Seattle’s Golden Gardens Park for a day of marathon trainingon Sunday.
Four miles into her 10-miles run, the 36-year-old stopped to use a publicrestroom. “As I was drying my hands I became aware that something was wrong,” Herron recalled to ABC News. When she turned around, she saw a man standing in the bathroom.
According to police documents, Gary Steiner a 40-year-old registered level 3 sex offender in Arizona allegedly assaulted her.
“He immediately took me down to the ground, hit both my knees and legs, and then it was a fight on the bathroom floor and I just kept screaming, not today m f,’ ” Herronsaid.
Herron described how she was able to briefly fend him off bygoing into a bathroom stall, even jamming the door. However,Steiner came into the stall from the side and “started beating me in the face with his hand.”
During the altercation, Herron thought “this doesn’t have to be a fair fight” and defended herself by using self-defense tactics that she had learned in a two-hour class just three weeks earlier.
Pick up PEOPLE’s special edition True Crime Stories: Cases That Shocked America, on sale now, for the latest on Casey Anthony, JonBent Ramsey and more.
“I was screaming at him, not today, m f.’ Being loud and not afraid. I mean you are afraid, but letting him know you are not taking me down today. You are not going to win this fight,” she told a local ABC affiliate Kiro 7of clawinghis face and escaping the bathroom.
According to court documents obtained by a KOMO News, Steiner was locked inside the stall after someone put a carabiner on the door. On Wednesday, prosecutors charged himwith second-degree attempted rape after he allegedly toldSeattle police that he went to the bathroom with the intention of raping a woman.
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.
Following her incident, Herron returned to Golden Gardens Park Wednesday for the first time since she was attacked in the restroom.
“That was the only thing that was motivating me I cannot be raped by this guy in this place,” she said to Kiro 7. “We don’t have to go down. We don’t have to be quiet about it.”
