Thanks to Milford421 for this report....
Tied-up Columbia student left to die used fire set by creep to free herself
Pervert tried to kill her
Tied-up Columbia student left to die used fire set by creep to free
herself
BY JIMMY VIELKIND, LISA L. COLANGELO and MELISSA GRACE
DAILY NEWS WRITERS
Monday, April 16th 2007, 4:00 AM
Tied up and left to die in a burning apartment, a Columbia student
used the blaze set by her sadistic rapist to free herself, Police
Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.
“It appears she was able to escape as a result of the fire,” Kelly
said. “She was tied, and the flame was used by her to break the
bond.”
The 23-year-old woman, identified by sources as a student at the
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, endured 19 hours of rape and
torture at the hands of a sick creep in her Hamilton Heights
apartment Friday night.
In what Kelly called a “particularly vicious” assault, the fiend
tied his victim to a bed, cut her, raped her, burned her with
scalding water and chemicals - and then set the woman’s futon on
fire to cover up the crime, police said.
He was so brutal he slit her eyelids, Kelly said.
The student used the flames to free herself and fled her fifth-floor
apartment with her hands still bound to each other to get help from
a neighbor, officials said.
The woman remains hospitalized in serious but stable condition.
Cops yesterday were combing through surveillance video for images of
the attacker, who followed the woman into her building near City
College at 9:30 p.m.
Kelly said detectives were looking to see if there was any evidence
the rapist had attacked before, but said, “It does not appear right
now to be part of a pattern.”
One man said he saw the victim in the basement of the building
shortly after she escaped.
“She just kept saying, ‘I’ve been raped,’ “ said Ronald Ward, 19,
who spotted the fire and ran downstairs for help, where he found the
building’s superintendent, Carl Peroune, trying to soothe the woman
as they waited for an ambulance.
“She was down there crying,” Ward said.
Police were hunting for the attacker, described as a bald, 6-foot-1,
180-pound black man in his 30s with a goatee and a scar on his
abdomen.
Several residents of the woman’s six-story Hamilton Terrace
building, located on a quiet treelined block of neat rowhouses, said
she had moved in within the last two months.
“I’ve been living in this building 30 years, and nothing like this
ever happened,” said another resident, Teddy Perkins, 55. “This is
real shocking.”
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/under-investigation/
Shooter ID
ABC News has learned the shooter who killed himself was a student of Korean descent named Seung Hui Cho who lived in a campus dorm. Cho was reportedly carrying a backpack with a receipt for the purchase of a 9 mm Glock.
http://abcnews.go.com/