Rape victim tells how she fought back
The fourth time Erika Martyn regained consciousness on the couch of her rapist’s Surrey apartment, she feared her time on earth was fast running out.
A curtain of blood pouring down from wounds on her head had blurred her vision, and her clothes had been torn off, exposing swelling and dark bruising on her tiny frame where she had been repeatedly kicked and punched.
“That’s when I said I’m going to fight this bastard. I’m not going to let him get away with this,” Martyn told The Sun Tuesday eight months after she was grabbed by a stranger while walking near the Gateway SkyTrain station in Surrey, raped and beaten.
Martyn, a 33-year-old mother of three who is living with a friend in Surrey, could have remained anonymous, but she asked for the removal of a ban on publication that courts normally impose to shield the names of sexual assault victims.
On Monday, just as her attacker’s nine-day trial was to begin in B. C. Supreme Court in New Westminster, Mohamed Hagi Mohamud pleaded guilty to unlawful confinement and sexual assault causing bodily harm. He was sentenced to four-and-ahalf years in prison.
Somalia-born Mohamud, who is not a Canadian citizen, has been convicted twice in Canada — for assault with a weapon in 1997, and assault causing bodily harm in 2002.
Immigration officials could not explain Tuesday why deportation proceedings had not been pursued to send Mohamud back home to Somalia after the first and second convictions. On
March 15, the day after the Martyn was raped the immigration and refugee board received a request to hold a deportation hearing for Mohamud. The hearing was postponed.
Immigrants who live in Canada but are not Canadian citizens can be deported to their country of origin if they are convicted of serious criminal offences.
DNA evidence Martyn deliberately left behind at the scene helped link Mohamud to the crime.
A big fan of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation television series, Martyn said she smeared blood from her face on the couch, wall and any surface she could touch, believing it would be the forensic evidence police would need to convict her attacker.
“ I thought, ‘ if he does kill me, then I know they’ll have my DNA everywhere and they’ll know he was the one,’” she said. “I put my own blood on him as well in case he didn’t wash or anything and they got him quick enough.
“ I just stuck to my guns and thought of everything I could so this person wouldn’t get away,” she said.
It was March 14 this year when Mohamud accosted Martyn near the SkyTrain station as she was walking home from a party after midnight.
A recovering crack cocaine addict, Martyn had relapsed earlier that day and had smoked crack and marijuana. By midnight, she’d had enough and started walking home down King George Highway, a route she’d safely taken many times before.
She was near the SkyTrain station, a rough neighbourhood frequented by sex- trade workers, drug dealers and addicts, when Mohamud, a stranger to her, approached her and asked her if she wanted to party with him.
“I said, ‘ No, I’m not partying. I’m not a working girl,’” she said.
Martyn said he finally left her alone, and he crossed the road towards a sex-trade worker.
“I thought, oh, what a relief.”
But her relief was short- lived. Within five minutes, Mohamud approached her from behind and put a knife to her throat.
“He said, ‘Keep walking, if you insist on fighting me, I will slit your throat or I will shoot you,’” Martyn recalled.
Mohamud, a 33- year-old Surrey resident, made her walk several kilometres to his home in the 14000-block of Kindersley Drive in Surrey.
Martyn said she kept him talking as they walked, hoping to gather as much information on him so if she survived she could identify him.
“I’ve learned a lot from CSI,” she said.
At Mohamud’s apartment, things quickly got rough.
“He was really aggressive,” she said. “ I think he was on some harsh drugs because he was coming and going and he wasn’t making sense, and then he proceeded to attack me.”
Martyn suffered broken cartilege in her nose, damage to her left eye, and severe bruising and cuts to her face as he repeatedly beat her with his hands and some kind of round metal object. He also kicked and kneed her, causing bruising to her kidneys, liver and lungs. She passed out at least four times, she said, then she decided she had to fight for her life.
“I fought him. I didn’t care. I was fighting for me and my girls. I just said, ‘You’re not going to get away with this. You picked the wrong chick,’” she said.
Martyn coaxed her attacker to get a towel for her to wipe the blood from her face and when he left the room she ran to the door but Mohamud slammed it on her foot. She kicked him in the jaw, catching off balance, and she ran out of the apartment into the street.
Residents at the first four houses she approached refused to help her. At the fifth, a 70- year-old man agreed to phone police. He offered her a cigarette through a chained front doorway, but Martyn refused. She didn’t want anything to interfere with DNA collection, she said.
Police and an ambulance got to her within 10 minutes and she was taken to hospital.
On Tuesday Martyn said she decided to speak about her ordeal in order to encourage other women to step forward and nail
their attackers. She praised the support she received from Surrey
police and the rape relief centre, as well as her three daughters.
“My girls are my support,” she said. “I want them to look up to me as a role model.”
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With files from Adrienne Tanner