A tourist visiting from Toronto was randomly attacked while walking on Vancouver’s Seawall.
Vancouver police confirmed the incident happened on April 15 at 12:30 a.m. in the Coal Harbour neighbourhood.
The victim posted about the incident on TikTok, appearing with two black eyes and bruising on her face.
She said she had been in Vancouver for a little over 24 hours and decided to leave her hotel and see some of the city sights and have dinner.
She said the suspect said something to her, which she doesn’t remember, and as she turned toward him she said he ran at her and attacked her.
“I’ve honest to God never seen anything like that where it seemed like he was a predator and I was the prey,” she said in the TikTok video. “It was just (like) he locked in on me and thought, ‘I’m going to kill this girl.'”
She said she started running but so did the suspect and he managed to grab her by the back of her jacket and slam her into the ground.
That’s when she said she started fighting back.
“Screaming, fighting,” she said.
She also had some White Claw vodka sodas in a bag and she was swinging those at him. “Just wailing on him,” she said.
That’s when the man took off and she said she called 911 to report that she had been attacked.
However, the suspect was still following her and she said he grabbed her phone out of her hands and smashed it on the ground.
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“The only way I can describe him is gleeful,” she said. “He was taking great joy in hurting me. I just knew, this person is not OK, there’s no way to ration or reason with him.”
During the second assault, she said she was doing everything she could to kick him and to attract attention.
“At one point he even grabbed my foot and ripped my shoe off because I had been kicking him in the face so hard,” she said.
She was able to get away and run again but he grabbed her a third time, she said.
“The third time he grabbed me, that’s when he specifically started wailing on my head,” she said. “And that was the point where I just blacked out completely, my vision just went blank and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.'”
She said she kept telling herself to get up, no matter what, just get up.
She did and she just kept running to where she knew there would be people. She said the man lunged at her a fourth time but didn’t quite grab her.
She said he broke her nose so she was covered in blood from that and from a large cut above her eye.
She finally found a group of people, who she later found were undercover police officers.
“So when I went screaming at them, they could clearly still see the distress I was in and he was still chasing me,” she said.
“He was still trying to attack me and kill me.”
The police officers were able to arrest the suspect because he was still chasing her. After that she sat down with them, before going to the hospital, to make sure she gave her statement while it was still fresh in her mind.
“They were wonderful and did a really great job, I have to say,” she said. “It was a super terrible experience but every single first responder that I dealt with — from the police, the EMTs, the doctors and nurses in hospital, the victim services units that I’ve been dealing with afterwards — were so wonderful.
“I cannot be grateful enough.”
Sgt. Steve Addison with the Vancouver Police Department said he cannot imagine what the victim went through.
“I have to commend her, her courage, her composure, her resilience, her tenacity, not only to fight through what she went through, being attacked by a complete stranger, but then to tell her story,” he said.
Addison said they received multiple 911 calls that night, which alerted all the police officers in the area to respond.
“The woman, the victim in this case, the woman who survived this attack, who fought through the attack and survived, has serious injuries,” he added.
“They’re physical injuries. She’s also going to have undoubtedly emotional injuries that will probably take even longer to heal than those physical injuries, so we’ll support her. We absolutely commend her.
“Extremely courageous, extremely tenacious, and we don’t have enough, I just don’t have enough positive words to describe who she is, what she’s been through and how she’s dealing with it.”
Peterhans Jalo Nungu has been charged with assault causing bodily harm and was due in court on Wednesday.
He was released on 10 conditions including reporting to his bail supervisor within one day of his release, he must live at a South Vancouver coop housing building with his mother under house arrest and can only leave for court or medical appointments, he cannot have any contact with the victim, he cannot posses weapons, consume drugs or alcohol and he must attend psychiatric intake assessment or treatment program to forensic psychiatric services
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