CHAPTER 5
INSTINCT
Sex. Rape. These crimes
are what Melissa immediately thought upon realizing she had been suddenly awoken by a guy who was on top of her, pounding her in the face with a blunt object.
It had started exactly like that: Melissa opened her eyes and felt around in the dark, only to be whacked repeatedly by blows to the head by someone straddling her.
The nightmare was real. It was happening.
“I was assuming that it was eventually, probably, going to be a rape,” Melissa said later. “That was my first thought.”
Why else would a man break into a woman’s home and begin beating her?
This thought of being sexually assaulted scared the hell out of Melissa Schickel. A single woman’s worst fears taking place in front of her: A rapist/home invader gets inside her apartment; she’s alone; there is nothing she can do.
Her attacker bashed Melissa in the head, over and over. The blows were violent and sudden and full of force. “Waking up as a blow” hit her, Melissa later recalled, she actually screamed out in fear, as loud as she could, “What the fuck?” (She termed her response and language a “trucker’s mouth.”)
Next she realized he was, in fact, straddling her, striking her repeatedly, and he wasn’t going to let up.
He wasn’t a large man or that muscular. Melissa knew this because her former boyfriend was two hundred pounds, and she recalled this man—the monster from underneath the bed—to be much, much lighter, by as many as fifty pounds. He was skinny, too. Scrawny, even. Plus, he had a particular stink to him.
Despite his size, though, he had mounted himself on top of Melissa, held her down, and was continually smashing a hard object into Melissa’s head and face. She had no idea what was happening or who this animal attacking her was. Nor did she know what he actually wanted from her. Moments had gone by now and he was still just beating her.
Instinct took over from there as Melissa was being brutally beaten to death.
She immediately rolled over on her back; then she put her arms up to block the blows to the back of her head.
“Help me!” Melissa screamed.
She could smell an aroma of stale booze mixed with some type of cologne. It was horrifying. Alarming. The guy smelled like the inside of a nightclub after a Saturday night.
Things took a strange turn when Melissa realized she didn’t know if she was screaming out loud or not. It all seemed so surreal: One moment she was sleeping, and the next she was being brutally beaten by a stranger in her own bed. How had he gotten in? Was he hiding inside the apartment? Who was he? What did he want?
“Just as in your dreams,” Melissa said, “you can’t really tell if you are screaming out loud.”
As she flailed her arms around, trying to protect herself, a thought occurred to Melissa that her attacker might be a young kid.
Is this some teenager?
“It was because his face was so smooth,” she explained later.
And his size: He was so damn small.
In a way Melissa was paralyzed by the fear of the unknown and the possibility of being killed, but she was also running on adrenaline and thinking about what she could do to stop what she now believed was a man on top of her who was going to rape and kill her violently.
Melissa recognized she had screamed out loud when she heard her attacker say, “Shut up, bitch!” He spoke through clenched teeth, as if trying to disguise his voice.
Melissa screamed again.
“Shut
up,
bitch!” he said again.
It was right after he uttered those words for a second time when Melissa felt the first stab wound—a hot, metallic pain, electrifying, and then a burst of hot liquid above her left eye, like a large blister had exploded.
He just stabbed me in the eye,
Melissa thought.
The sting of the blows was severe. Random. It was dark. She could not see anything.
Melissa’s attacker had actually stabbed her just above her left eye in the brow, an area of the body that bleeds profusely.
Almost immediately blood ran down from the top of her brow into her eyes, blinding her. It was pitch-dark, anyway—but Melissa now believed she’d lost one of her eyes to the blade of a knife.
Feelings were coming in waves through all the pain as Melissa continued to fight the guy off best she could.
She continued to scream. Each time, louder and louder, hoping somebody outside the sliding glass door, or the women in the apartment below, would hear her.
He kept repeating, in a threatening manner: “Shut up, bitch! Shut up. . . .”
“The more he told me to shut up, the more I would scream. And I just kept fighting and fighting,” Melissa said later.
Melissa considered what every self-defense class taught women: Poke him in the eyes. But then, as soon as that thought occurred, she told herself,
No. If I miss, or don’t do it hard enough to stop him, it’s only going to piss him off more
.
Plus, as it stood, he was the one with the weapon—and surely angry enough already.
With the idea of poking him in the eyes swept from her mind, Melissa had a second thought.
Use your legs—and start kicking.
Melissa felt he did not have a firm grip because she was flailing around so much and giving him a difficult time. She even thought she should begin punching at him and kicking at the same time.
And so she did.
As they fought, Melissa managed to strike him with one of her legs in the face.
Then she grabbed the knife blade.
“I didn’t even know it was a knife, really,” she later said. “I didn’t know what the hell he had.”
Reaching out and punching and kicking and grabbing, Melissa wound up with the knife.
CHAPTER 6
WHITE LIGHT APPROACHING
Realizing the knife
was in her hands now, Melissa’s attacker started to punch her in the face.
Blow after blow after blow.
Melissa was fighting for her life. She also still believed without a doubt that his one true motivation was to rape her. She wasn’t about to allow that to happen without a fight.
As she punched and kicked her legs (almost winning at one point), slowing him down at least, Melissa started to feel the effects of losing so much blood. The sheets around her were soaking wet. Blood had engulfed her face and hands and body.
Then, suddenly, as if the air was let out of her body, Melissa became weaker and weaker.
“I really couldn’t fight anymore. . . .”
Her next thought was:
That’s it . . . I’m dead
.
As Melissa faded, her attacker reached down and put his hands on her panties.
Then he started to pull them down her legs.
All Melissa had now were her thoughts and words. She had no fight left within a body suffering from the effects of losing so much blood. It was so dark in the room, she realized, Melissa didn’t even know how much blood she’d lost, but she could sense all the tackiness and wetness around her, on the bed, on her body. She could taste the steeliness of her own blood, the salty, metallic bitterness. She could feel her head spinning, the dizziness, the light-headedness.
He was winning.
Melissa’s attacker was about to rape her.
Melissa realized she was probably going to die.
CHAPTER 7
SECOND WIND
As Melissa later
explained in her own words, she would learn in those harrowing days after her attack that her attacker had actually used a hockey stick he found inside her apartment to beat her that night. His choice of weapon would have a detrimental psychological effect on Melissa forever.
I guess I should back up for a minute here, for a couple of reasons. First, before any of this happened, I was really into going to hockey games, comedy clubs, and watching bands. That is why it came as kind of a sad shock to me that I was beaten with one of the hockey sticks I had collected. It made me question how I would react if I tried to go back to watch a hockey game.
I was blessed to have a great sense of humor. It was something I seemed to get from my father and my grandmother. Like I said, one of my “vices” before this happened was comedy. I had season tickets to the local hockey team and I would go to the comedy club as often as I could. I had also been fortunate enough to make friends with several local and national comic—some known, some unknown (at the time). Before my attack, I used to date a couple of local comics. I also used to hang out with this one national comic who would come to town two or three times a year. He even finally made a small, unknown movie called Ski Patrol. When it came out on video, he would come into the video store I was running and yell, “Hey, where’s my movie?” People would just stare at him strangely. I would point and say, “Over there, Mr. Lopez.” I kept trying to convince people to go see this comedian and people kept saying, “George who?”
Too bad they didn’t listen.
Not knowing where she might have dredged up the presence of mind to do it, very quietly, almost in a whisper, Melissa said to her attacker: “Excuse me, but I’m bleeding very badly.”
This comment stopped the bogeyman in his tracks. He froze. Perhaps he did not expect his victim to humanize herself. She was not an object any longer, maybe. Melissa had turned herself into a person, a human being.
After she said that, Melissa’s attacker quickly jumped off the bed and ran, as if Melissa’s comment had snapped him out of the rage-fueled, sexual frenzy he was in and brought him back to reality. It was as though he realized what he was doing wasn’t working.
Melissa thought quickly and reacted.
“I did not even give him the chance to get to the bedroom door when I rolled over and grabbed the phone and dialed 911.”
A move that likely had saved her life.
As her attacker scrambled to get out of the apartment, Melissa pleaded with the 911 dispatcher. Her first two sentences were so quick and garbled and full of terror, the words were hard to comprehend. What wasn’t difficult to recognize, however, turned out to be the final words of Melissa’s first interaction with that 911 dispatcher: “. . . He tried to rape me. . . . I’m bleeding. . . .”
Melissa sounded defeated. At the end. Doomed.
“Ma’am, slow down and take a deep breath and repeat what you just said,” the dispatcher said firmly.
“. . . I . . . I . . . he . . . He tried to rape me and I am bleeding very badly.”
“Okay, do you need an ambulance?”
“Yes!” Melissa said, and then she broke down into tears.
“. . . Don’t hang up.”
“I’m not going to hang up.”
Dispatch asked Melissa if she was calling from an address dispatch had on file already, which she must have gotten from caller ID.
“Yes . . . yes,” she said frantically, confirming. “I’m bleeding very, very badly. . . .”
“Attempt rape,” dispatch reported to another person on another line.
“I think he stabbed me,” Melissa said over that.
“Okay, ma’am, what’s your name?”
Melissa gave it.
There was some rapid-fire keyboard tapping while Melissa could be heard breathing deeply, heavily, Darth Vader–like, her rate of taking in air becoming slower and slower.
“Okay, ma’am . . . Okay, what did he look like?”
“I can’t tell you—I was asleep.” Her voice had a terror to it. It was as though Melissa, as she explained it, was just then realizing what had happened and how badly she was possibly hurt.
There was a lot more computer keyboard tapping. Then dispatch said, “There’s an ambulance on the way to you, ma’am.”
“I need the police. . . .”
“I know . . . just stay on the line with me and calm down, okay?”
“I know . . . I know . . . ,” Melissa said through tears, her breathing now terribly labored. She was fading in and out.
“Just stay with me and calm down, ma’am.” Dispatch was trying her best to keep Melissa talking, breathing, and alert.
“I am . . . I am surprised I am this calm,” Melissa said.
“Was the man black or white? Could you tell?”
“I have no idea,” Melissa answered.
More vigorous keyboard tapping in between long periods of no talking.
At one point, as dispatch explained a procedure, Melissa said, “I think I’m going to pass out. . . .”
CHAPTER 8
DAYLIGHT FADING
“
Okay, just stay
on the phone with me,” dispatch told Melissa, because she sounded groggy, loopy, out of it.
“Yeah . . . yeah . . .”
“You need to sit down, ma’am.”
After a bit of back-and-forth: “Take a deep breath through your nose and—”
“I can’t,” Melissa said. She made a noise, sounding like she was fading away.
Dispatch started asking Melissa questions to keep her talking: “How did he get in?”
“I think . . . probably, I think . . . through the patio door, I think ... ’cause I leave it sometimes . . .” Melissa tried her best to explain. Her speech was diminishing, for sure. Her words were now slurring a bit.
“Did he take anything?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t looked,” Melissa said.
“Okay, are you still bleeding? Do you have a towel or something that you can—”
“I can’t . . . ,” Melissa started to say, but she ran out of breath before finishing. She came across as someone who had been awoken in the middle of the night and was being asked questions.
Dispatch was losing her.
“Is there a towel or something you can put over where you were hurt?”
“No . . . ,” Melissa answered. It sounded as though it was taking every ounce of energy she had left to get just that one word out.
“You don’t have any towel or anything?”
“I can’t . . . I . . . Oh, God, I feel like I’m about to . . .”
“Okay, ma’am, can you lay down? Where . . . Where are you hurt?”
“I think . . . I think on my face.”
“Okay, are you hurt anywhere else?”
“On my arm . . . on my head . . . he beat me over the head.” Melissa was just about gone. Her speech was slow and lethargic, as if she was really drunk.
“Did he use a knife on you?”
“He had something, I think. I don’t know what it was.”
They talked back and forth for a few moments. Dispatch told Melissa to “keep her feet up.” It would help. And she needed to keep talking.
“Please hurry,” Melissa pleaded.
“They’re on their way.”
Things went quiet for a time.
“Are you okay?” the dispatch operator wondered after not hearing from Melissa.
“I don’t know. I’ve lost an awful lot of blood—”
“There’s more blood in you than you think,” the dispatch operator said, trying to keep Melissa focused on staying with her.
(“Since I was speaking very clearly and coherently,” Melissa reflected later, “she apparently felt it was not as serious as I was trying to describe it. I kept trying to tell her I was losing a lot of blood.”)
Then Melissa said, “There’s someone knocking, I think. Hold on, okay? . . .”
“Melissa? Melissa?”
The recording went quiet, with the exception of some static. A moment later, Melissa came back on the line. “They’re here now—”
“Okay, go talk to them.”
“Thank you,” Melissa said.
“Later,” Melissa explained, “the [detective investigating the case] told me that they actually were laughing at my conversation with the dispatcher and how adamant I was—that is, until she saw the crime scene. [The detective] said she had never encountered so much blood, even at the murder scenes she had investigated.”