Twenty-five years ago, Kristi was brutally attacked in an ordeal that forever changed her perspective on personal safety. This week, she bravely revisits that horrifying night, when a man feigned familiarity to gain her trust, only to launch a violent assault while she was driving through what she believed to be a safe neighborhood.
He left her for dead, and fled before police arrived. He then went on to attack two more women before he was caught, seven months later. Kristi says the ordeal, which is still vivid today, inspired her to launch the hugely successful K9s4COPS, a non-profit which places trained dogs with law enforcement agencies and in schools across the United States. In this episode we learn about the incredible work K9s4COPS is doing every day, and how we can support it.
https://www.K9s4COPS.org
STORIES
00:00 - Start
00:11 - Trigger Warning
00:19 - Kristi's story
00:43 - 24/25 years ago, a man approaches my car
01:43 - He walks away. In my mind that was closure
01:53 - He comes up again, says he's in a bind, can you give me a ride to my car?
02:29 - Is he going to think I'm a snob?
02:43 - So I agreed to give him a ride
03:02 - I realized there was nobody around on the unlit county road
03:51 - He hit me with such force it shattered the window. We went down into a ditch.
03:59 - Next thing you know, I was fighting for my life
04:04 - I was thinking: "Of all the stupid choices I could have made".
04:25 - Mentally, I was in my home town
04:40 - He wanted to rape me and kill me
04:56 - His eyes were just the devil.
05:24 - There's blood everywhere, some from the windscreen
05:43 - I'm fighting for my life
06:15 - Just scream
06:30 - He had attacked two other women. I can't scream, nobody's going to hear me
07:05 - A woman driving behind calls the police
07:42 - I'm glad I didn't have my gun.
07:55 - I'm not anti-gun, I'm anti-gun in the wrong hands
08:28 - Situational awareness is important
09:33 - I find the door handle
09:55 - I've got to get good scratches in for when they take the DNA when I'm dead
10:20 - I fractured my arm, but I took off running
11:10 - A cop arriving sees a bloody nude woman, and the suspect escaped
12:20 - A girl arrives, she's trying to stop the bleeding
13:04 - When do those dogs get here, who will find him?
13:40 - They caught him 7 months later after he'd attacked two other women
13:53 - If they'd only had a dog?
14:45 - The legacy of K9s4COPS.org
15:30 - Supplementing our law enforcement agencies
15:56 - The politicians can take the credit
17:03 - God puts you in certain situations, where you don't realize your story can help someone
17:25 - How to connect with Kristi and Alissa at K9s4COPS.org