can go before the woman retaliates. If they don’t retaliate, that makes them an easier target. They try to find vulnerable women and pounce. They will go around and follow that person to find out their schedule, see what parks and grocery stores they go to. When they collect that information they give it to the taker. The taker will monitor that person for a couple of weeks or months, to find out the best time to take that person, whether it be their morning job, or when they are sitting in their car checking their phone, not paying atten- tion to their surroundings. The police assumed the person who attacked me was still working a certain perimeter [of San Diego] for targeting.” At the police station, Rachel worked with a sketch artist to compose a likeness of her assailant. “That’s the thing,”
Rachel tells me, “when I first noticed this young man, I didn’t really notice him. I didn’t take account of him. It didn’t hit me until I had to sit in a chair and have an artist try to draw how far away his eyebrows were from each
other and the bridge of his nose, the shape of his eye, that I didn’t take a real mental picture of him. It was frustrating. Ever since then, I play mental games with myself, memorizing license-plate numbers and the exact details of strang- ers’ faces, just in case.” Two days later, the
police found a man at a nearby park matching Rachel’s description. “They found him at a
park around the corner from Horizon school [in Clairemont]. There is a little community park right there. [Plain-clothed offi- cers] saw a man matching the description I gave them approach a couple of dif- ferent women at the park. He went up to a blonde woman, kept getting closer, and closer, and closer. She pushed him away. Police swooped in and got him.” They asked the blonde
what he was saying and it was almost word-for- word the same lines he had used on Rachel: “My heart aches for you. I want to get to know you better. Let’s go to the beach. Let’s have coffee.” Rachel drove down
to the Western Division police station on Gaines
Street to identify him. “They had five or six
people that were similar in height and description. I picked him out right away. They told me to go home, they would call me later. Later they told me that they couldn’t really arrest him on an assump- tion of assault and battery. They took his picture and booked him. They kept him there for 48 hours.” A background check revealed only a misdemeanor. Explains Rachel, “They
said, ‘You could take him to court. You posi- tively identified him. He matches your descrip- tion, but he didn’t pen- etrate you. It wasn’t rape. He didn’t cause you any bodily harm or physical damage to any property you own.’ He wasn’t even physically on my property; he was on my cul-de-sac. He wasn’t trespassing, so really what would I take him to court for? That he freaked me out?” Officers told Rachel that
the district attorney would point out that she didn’t run or scream right away and that initially she didn’t feel she was in danger. Rachel shrugs and adds, “The DA might say,
‘Maybe you were lead- ing him on.’ The officers explained that there are all these different scenarios that could make him look like an innocent man that I was dragging through the mud, even though clearly that was not the case.” In the end, the man was released. The emotional drama wasn’t worth it. Rachel was told if she pressed chargers and took him to court, her attacker would only end up with 60 days in jail and a couple of hours of community ser- vice. He did, however, walk away with a record — not a charge, an arrest for sex- ual assault. The memory of that day sticks with her. “I didn’t think some-
thing like that would ever happen to me. It was such a shocking experience. It all happened so fast. I was shaking for days and couldn’t sleep.” Rachel breaks down and through tears continues, “Com- munity parks no longer felt safe. I was super cau- tious all the time. If I was out with my kids, and I felt uncomfortable we would have to pack up and go home. I don’t let me kids play alone in our front
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yard, ever. You don’t know what will happen. He was a nice-looking young man. I wouldn’t expect him to be threatening or intimidat- ing. In my mind, all those drug dealers or sex-traf- ficking people would have a certain look to them. He did not have that. He was a clean-cut, classy look- ing guy.” After the attack, Rachel
grew anxious anytime an unfamiliar car drove down her street. The slightest noises terrified her. So, after a week, she took her three kids and stayed at her parents’ house in Alaska for the rest of the summer. “Our family was new to California. My husband had just been stationed at the Coast Guard base. I almost didn’t come back, but I got a job as a secre- tary at the kids’ school. The principal wanted me to start the week before school started. When I came back I couldn’t sleep. There were a lot of night- sweats and terrors. When my husband had duty in the evening, I couldn’t sleep. I was done with Cali- fornia. In Alaska I could chit-chat with strangers without having to worry; here it felt different. My
husband didn’t really understand it. He wasn’t there when I was inter- viewed by police or when I had to do the lineup. When I explained to him that they got the guy, his response was, ‘Well, that is good. Now it’s done.’ But it really wasn’t done; not for me, anyway.” Rachel still struggles
with the idea that her attacker is out there, walk- ing around free. “It makes me really
angry. I know he didn’t cause me any bodily harm. I could have had it a lot worse, I know I could have. But why do we have to wait until it gets to that point to get crazies off the street?! He had no good intentions. He obviously had sinister motives, yet because the way our sys- tem is set up, he is allowed a second chance. That is scary. It’s scarier for other young moms out there that might have to go through the same thing. The Chris- tian in me says, ‘Forgive him. Maybe he has used this experience to learn and grow and carve out a better life for himself.’ But, I don’t care to learn if he turned his life around.” — Siobhan Braun
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