A California woman was walking her dogs in the field when a homeless man brutally raped her and beat her, disfiguring her face.
Now, she bravely came forward telling her horrific story as a warning to other women.
On July 31, Marissa Young was walking her two 13-year-old dogs late at night in the Torrance neighborhood of Los Angeles. She had just finished her shift at a nearby restaurant.
Recalling the trauma, the 44-year-old woman told KTLA:
“I was tackled from behind, I heard nothing. I didn’t have headphones in, I wasn’t looking at my phone, I was just walking straight forward to my destination.” She also went on to explain, “This person punched me in the face, closed-fisted, 15 to 20 times at least. My nose is broken in four different places and this bone was shattered here [she points to her upper cheek area]. You can still see a lot of swelling in my face.”
After beating her, the man forced her to the ground and began raping Young.
She screamed for help, “I’m being raped! I’m being killed!”
However, eventually, Young managed to save herself from the 46-year-old suspected rapist. She asserted, “Probably three-quarters of the attack I fought back, cause I was fighting for my life. It was a crime of opportunity, because I’m of small stature and my back was to him.”
Young said, “I fought back like crazy – I did everything to get this person off of me. I bit his fingers, I tried to push him off of me.”
“He asked – well told – me to perform oral sex on him, which is when I bit his penis as hard as I could – to try to bite it off in the hopes that he would run away,” Young explained. “It did not come off – it just injured him severely – it just angered him and enraged him. He beat me even more severely. He was able to continue the rape even though he was severely injured in that sense.”
The attacker was a 46-year-old homeless man, Darrel Waters, according to reports. He had been freed from jail just days prior to the rape and should have been held in custody due to the violent nature of his second offense.
Young also expressed her anger towards the authorities and Waters, who was freed from jail mere days before the tragedy. The man was reportedly nabbed on a misdemeanor charge of unlawful possession of a dagger.
“Once something like this happens to you, it sort of changes your mind as to what the laws should be. It’s a difficult thing to discuss, cause I don’t want to warn women necessarily, because we have to be able to go out and do things like walk our dogs,” Young said, according to CBS News.
As per reports, the woman now has to go through eight dental implants apart from other treatments and therapy for her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She has already undergone five surgeries in three months. To help her financially, her friend Debbie Keyser has started a GoFundMe.