Man sentenced for knife attack on ex-girlfriend
VISTA
Before the attack, the then-72 year-old woman was an avid cyclist, pounding out 80 to 100 miles on her bike a week. Then came the midday ambush in a Carlsbad Costco parking lot.
As she loaded groceries into her car and with her back turned, her ex-boyfriend pounced. He stabbed her in the back four times. Punched her. Gouged an eye. Kicked her head “like it was a soccer ball,” she said in a court hearing Monday.
Not long after she gave her statement, her assailant
Charles Higgins, 64, was sentenced to 19 years and eight months in prison for the March 23, 2018, attack that ended when strangers intervened.
It was the maximum sentence Vista Superior Court Judge Brad Weinreb could order for Higgins. Weinreb, who presided over the 2019 trial, said at the sentencing hearing that the crime had involved “a significant amount of planning and sophistication, and noted that Higgins had followed his ex before he “brazenly attacked her in open public in that parking lot.”
The judge also noted that had witnesses not jumped in, the victim likely would have died.
At trial, a North County jury deadlocked — 9-3 in favor of guilt — on a charge of premeditated attempted murder, but convicted Higgins of inflicting corporal injury on a former significant other, with allegations that he used a knife in the attack.
The year before the near-fatal attack, Higgins had pleaded guilty to making threats against the victim. She was given a protective order barring him from contacting her, and it was still in effect when he ambushed her.
The attack left her in the intensive care unit for nine days. She had lost a lot of blood — he slashed her throat, cutting her carotid artery — and had a stroke. She had to relearn how to walk, swallow and eat. Nerve damage to her eye has affected her sight.
“My life as I knew it was viciously stolen from me,” said the victim.
The Union-Tribune is not naming the now 74-year-old victim, who said during the hearing that she remains scared for her life.