Sara's Story

[!-nessica-!]

There was no reason for caution, no reason for watchfulness. After all, this was the Meijer parking lot a few minutes past noon on a pleasant Saturday in mid-May. Fear was the farthest thing from Sara Ylen's thoughts as she hunted for a parking space.

A good friend was getting married the next day, and 26-year-old Ylen -- pronounced just as it looks, WHY-len -- had been helping with the preparations. Her morning had been spent in Port Huron, running errands for the wedding and getting her hair done. On her way back home to Sanilac County, she pulled her Dodge Grand Caravan into the Meijer lot in Fort Gratiot intending to pick up a few things -- she doesn't remember exactly what.

"There were a ton of people in the parking lot," she would recall in an interview more than two years later. "I always parked by the north door, but there were so many people I had to park quite a ways out. I put one foot out the door, onto the pavement, and reached back for my purse ...

"... and he was there."

This is the story of a brutal, brazen rape that took place in a crowded parking lot on a weekend afternoon at what may well be the busiest store in St. Clair County.

If the time and place seem astonishing, the rape itself is no more than the beginning of Ylen's story.

For this is also the account of a crime victim who, after months of despair and despondency, began to pursue her attacker with uncommon courage and unflagging determination.

It's a story, too, of how the criminal-justice system -- the detectives, the prosecutors, the courts -- succeeded in unraveling a heinous crime.

And it is, perhaps most of all, a story meant to assist other victims of sexual assault. They are not powerless. They can seek help. They can pursue justice. They can begin to understand that a scar, no matter how awful, is a sign of healing.

They can look to Sara Ylen for proof of it.

By well-established tradition, American newspapers do not identify the victims of sexual assault. This case is the rare exception because the victim, Ylen, gave permission for her name to be used. It was not a decision made lightly. She agonized over it, but in the end, she decided her privacy was subservient to her wish to help others like her.

"Rape is the most isolating crime that can happen," she said. "It alienates you from everyone, driving away people you thought were your friends. I had many in my life who heard the word 'rape' and couldn't get away fast enough. Most devastating, though, is the way it alienates you from yourself. So, if my coming forward and sharing my story makes someone realize that they are not completely alone, then it is so very worthwhile."

The moment Ylen stuck her foot out the door of her minivan, her life changed in ways that would prove horrific and irreversible.

She never saw her attacker coming. When she reached back for her purse and a handful of coupons, he struck from behind, shoving her deeper into the Grand Caravan with its darkly tinted windows. Bold and cruel, he stunned her with the fury and violence of his assault.

"Every time I would attempt to call out, he would hit me. He knew how to do it, where to hit to keep me from yelling out." As she described the scene, she touched her collarbone and winced, as if remembering the pain.

The attacker, at 5-foot-11, was about a half-foot taller than Ylen. He was much stronger. He overpowered her.

Months later, as part of an exercise for a rape-counseling group, she wrote of the attack in these words: "He was there. I turned and at the same moment, I felt his hand crushing my arm. His smell -- the alcohol, the cigarettes, the 'all-night-at-the-bar' smell -- pierced into my brain quickly. That was the smell that inspired fear."

He forced her inside the van and cursed her as he beat her, displacing two ribs and her pelvic bones. In trying to shield herself, she damaged the muscles and nerves in her left shoulder and arm.

"Please, you can have my van. Take it," she appealed. "I'll give you my purse. Just let me go. Please. Just let me out."

She wept and cried out for mercy, and he only beat her more viciously, cutting her face with a large gold-nugget ring he wore on the middle finger of his left hand. He also wore a studded-leather biker's bracelet on one wrist, and he used it to tear at her skin.

"It was vindictive at that point," she said, describing his cruelty. "He seemed very practiced at what he was doing."

Again and again, he used the ring as a weapon, used it to inflict maximum pain as he forced himself on her. In her narrative of the rape, Ylen described the images, electric and staccato, that pulsed through her mind as she was brutalized:

"God, please let him stop. I can't stop him. I don't want this. I can't stay here. I want him to stop. I can't be here. It's too much pain. I hurt too much. I want him to leave. I want him to go. Stop hurting me. Please, just stop. I can't be here anymore. There's too much pain. Everything is very dark. It's too black and fuzzy. I have to close my eyes. I can't win. God, please let him stop.

"God, please let me die."

There in a busy parking lot, surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of people going about their errands, the rapist seemed to Ylen more beast than man, driven by sadism not lust. He hurt her, and he hurt her, and he hurt her.

Mercifully, she lost consciousness.

"Maybe he didn't realize I was alive," she said. "When I came to, he was gone."

In regaining consciousness, she re-entered the nightmare. She found herself bleeding and bruised, partially unclothed, in agonizing pain. Dazed and disoriented, she had no idea if the danger had passed. It occurred to her the rapist might be close by. That he might realize she was alive and return to finish her off.

"I couldn't tell you where he came from," she said. "I couldn't tell you where he went to."

Her instinct was to get away. She did not summon help. She did not go inside the store to report the crime. Her only thought was to get home, to get to her husband and young sons, to get to a safe haven.

"I have to get out of here. The panic rises in me. I cannot function. I want to shut the door. Shut the door, Sara. Shut the damn door and lock it. I'm all thumbs. I can't find the lock button. I'm so afraid he'll come back. Damn it, Sara, lock the door!"

She has no memory of the drive from Fort Gratiot to her home in Sanilac County's Buel Township, near Croswell, a distance of more than 25 miles. What she does remember is how her husband, Jim, met her at the door. She remembers how his face paled as he saw her cuts and bruises.

He kept asking her what happened, she said, and at first she could only stare at him wordlessly. "My husband was firing questions at me at the speed of light," she recalled. "I was in that foggy state where you hear everything, but it doesn't quite register."

Finally, reluctantly, she told him a man had assaulted her. "He kept hitting me over and over," she said, "but I got away."

Yes, it was a lie, but how could she tell this man who loved her that she had been savagely raped? How could she describe the brutality of the attack? And how would he react? Her anxiety, in its own way, was as awful as the assault itself.

"My most difficult moment in all of this was to stand in front of my husband and tell him what had happened," she said. "And I couldn't. I couldn't tell him all of it."

About the time Ylen was getting home, 43-year-old James Eugene Grissom was punching into work at Meijer. It was 1:58 p.m., a little more than an hour after the rape.

Ylen insisted upon going to the wedding rehearsal and dinner Saturday evening, and she locked herself in the bathroom as she tried to cleanse herself.

"I just need to take a shower. It must be hot. Scalding hot. His filth, his touch, it has to go. I can't raise my arm above my head. It's hard to undress. I see the blood. ... I start vomiting. Then I collapse in the shower. I sit there, curled up in the shower, scrubbing until my skin is raw, until there is no more hot water."

She self-treated her wounds, dosed herself with painkillers, and hid her cuts and bruises as well as she could beneath layer after layer of makeup.

"I kicked into survival mode," she said. "I basically convinced myself I have to take care of everybody else. I knew they were counting on me for the wedding, and I decided I can't disappoint them."

She played the part of a good soldier, attending the rehearsal and meeting her husband and sons -- ages 2 and 4 -- at the rehearsal dinner. They left as soon as they could do so gracefully.

She did not sleep that night. She laid in bed and listened to the sound of her husband's breathing.

"How do I tell Jim? He thinks I got away. He's sleeping soundly. He doesn't know I'm here. That's OK. I don't want him to know I'm here. I'm not really here. I'm lost."

On Sunday, she went as planned to the long-anticipated wedding, wearing a long-sleeved dress -- rather than a sleeveless gown as the bride had wished -- to hide her bruises. "It took me hours to put on the makeup," she said, recalling how it took five layers of foundation to hide the gash on her face.

The wedding was in Sandusky, and on the way Jim and Sara stopped at the Michigan State Police post. Sara waited in the car while Jim went inside to report the assault. The St. Clair County sheriff had jurisdiction over the case, and arrangements were made for Sara to meet with a deputy the next morning at the Fort Gratiot Township hall.

The Ylens went on to the wedding, and Sara held up until the reception. "I fell apart on the dance floor," she said. "I don't remember leaving the reception. To this day, I don't remember going home."

On Monday morning, accompanied by a friend, Ylen drove to Fort Gratiot and met Deputy Tim O'Boyle in the parking lot of the township hall.

"That was intimidating all in itself," she said, recalling the interview in an outdoor setting with traffic whizzing by.

Once again, she reported a physical attack but not a sexual assault. She made no mention of rape.

She described her attacker as well as she could: a white male in his 30s with a scraggly beard and long hair poking out from beneath a ball cap. She recalled he smelled of alcohol and wore a studded-leather bracelet. She also described the gold-nugget ring he had worn on the middle finger of his left hand and had used to such cruel effect.

"Her description was pretty good," O'Boyle recalled.

Even so, she had not given the deputy much to work with. She had been ambushed and left unconscious. She had not seen her attacker either coming or going. She had no idea if he had been driving a vehicle, much less what make or model it might have been.

O'Boyle wrote it up as an attempted carjacking and went to Meijer, where he asked to see the videotape taken by the store's surveillance cameras at the time of the assault.

He hoped the tapes would help identify the attacker, but it did not pan out. The assault had occurred in a blind spot -- an area of the parking lot not covered by surveillance cameras. At the time, it seemed nothing more than bad luck.

O'Boyle had no idea a rape had occurred, but he still regarded the case as a priority. "We worked pretty hard on it," he said. "It was very upsetting a lady would be assaulted in the parking lot like that."

After meeting with the deputy, Ylen and her friend drove to the emergency room at Port Huron Hospital. "I had a hard time moving my shoulder and neck," she said. "I was in a lot of pain."

At the emergency room, she told the attending physician of the physical assault but again concealed the rape, in part because she had not yet told her husband and did not want to risk him learning about it from someone else. With her continued silence, there were no efforts to collect DNA samples or other physical evidence of a sexual assault.

Ylen is a native of Huron County at the tip of Michigan's Thumb, and on Tuesday -- three days after the rape -- an old and dear friend came to her house. They spent the day "just riding around and talking."

For the first time, Ylen confided in someone else that she had been raped. She asked her friend what she should do.

"You need to go home and tell your husband," the friend replied.

"Maybe it wasn't what I wanted to hear," Ylen said, "but I knew she was right."

She told her husband that evening, and Jim Ylen accompanied her the next day when she returned to the emergency room in Port Huron. Her physician on this visit was Dr. Thabit Ba**ur, who explained it was too late for a "rape kit" -- the collection of semen, hairs and other evidence -- because more than 72 hours had passed since the assault. He also gave her a phone number for Safe Horizons, a Port Huron counseling center and shelter for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.

For Sara Ylen, those minutes of brutality in the Meijer parking lot were only the beginning of an ordeal that would be measured in months and years.

She would describe it much later in these words: "There is unending grief that I compare to losing a loved one in death. In effect, I did. I lost myself."

By MIKE CONNELL
Times Herald

[Lanolin]

that is really intense

my heart goes out to that poor woman

[Markme]

that is such a terrible thing to happen to some one, if that guy is ever found, he should be boiled alive.
i think for that he deserves death.