Rape fears of new mother knifed in face
A NEW mother who was stabbed seven times in the face and neck as she pushed her baby in a pram told a court she feared she would be raped.
Josephine Conlon, 36, was returning from meeting other mothers when she was attacked with a kitchen knife by Mark Brazant on December 30.
The paranoid schizophrenic, 44, had been released from jail just days earlier on Christmas Eve, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.
Ms Conlon told the court she first became aware of Brazant when she was shoved in the back. She said: “I knew straight away it was not just someone trying to get me out of the way. I knew I was in danger.”
After being shoved again she dropped her phone, fell on to a driveway and the buggy with her daughter inside rolled and became wedged next to a parked car.
She said: “I remember him being above me. I remember thinking he had pushed me into the driveway because he was going to rape me.
“I realised I was being stabbed. I could feel blood.”
Ms Conlon said she thought about kneeing Brazant in the groin.
She then managed to rise “and that’s when he turned and ran away”.
Neighbours who heard her screams came to her and she was taken to hospital.
Ms Conlon, who said she needed help to ring her husband Greg because her hands were covered in blood, continues to have treatment for scars to her face and neck, the court heard.
She was on the phone to her mother Roseanne Eskell, who said she heard a “blood-curdling scream” during the attack in Streatham, south London.
The court heard Brazant walked intoWandsworth police station with a knife on January 2 this year, saying he had stabbed a person on the street.
Louise Oakley, prosecuting, said paranoid schizophrenia did not give him a defence to the “horrific crime”.
Jurors heard Brazant had been released from Thameside jail on December 24 after serving a term for battery and common assault.
He was later reported missing after failing to turn up at a supported house for people with mental health problems.
Brazant of Ealing, west London, accepts that he stabbed Ms Conlon but denies attempted murder.
The trial continues. aid