Kyle Hepp

September 11, 2007

Day 7:

You wanted the story of the time I was mugged…well here at Just Married Chilean Style my policy is “Ask and ye shall receive.” It’s long so buckle up and keep your hands and legs inside the ride please.

I had arrived in Chile only 5 days before I was mugged. The incident actually happened on my first night with my host family. I had met them earlier that same day — a mom and a daughter both named Lucy. Because my Spanish was so bad, I didn’t understand that the daughter was named Lucy too and whenever Mom Lucy referred to Daughter Lucy by her name, I just thought the mom was talking about herself in third person. I arrived at their house, didn’t even unpack my stuff and headed out with friends to explore the city and find out what Santiago night life had to offer me. The whole outing almost turned out to be uneventful. In fact I don’t even remember what we did or where we went.

But I do remember what happened as I was heading home.

One of the girls who lived nearby my host family asked if I wanted to share a taxi. I accepted her offer and we asked the driver to drop us off exactly in the middle of both our apartment complexes. It was two blocks east to my apartment and two blocks west to hers.

At only about 12:30 am, in a well lit, well off neighborhood, I thought I’d be fine going those two blocks to my apartment by myself. Actually, to be honest, I never even thought about it. I was literally 3 minutes from my apartment. I also felt safe because there were two bus stops within my range of sight and I could see at least 10 people waiting at both.

And before you call me stupid, just let me say that I’m from small town, Midwest, U.S.A. Where I grew up you could’ve went jogging naked at 4am and nothing would’ve ever happened. Not that I ever did that…I’m just saying. Point being, not stupid, just naive.

So I was cheerfully strolling along, not a care in the world, walking those last two blocks home, when all of a sudden, before I had a chance to react at all, two guys ran up to me from behind, covered my mouth, picked me up and carried me to the shadowy dark side of a building. I was writhing and squiggling as much as possible while they carried me but I didn’t stand a chance. There were two of them and they were both bigger and stronger than me. I’m not exactly a contender for American Gladiator (btw, raise your hand if you LOVED that show when you were a kid…I did!)

The worst part is that while they were carrying me off to where nobody could see me…I could see people. I was staring at everyone at the bus stop trying so hard to scream and get their attention so they would come help. But, because my mouth was covered by one of the thug’s hands with a glove on, any noise I made was way too muffled to be heard.

That’s what haunts me to this day. I continue to have nightmares that I’m screaming and nobody can hear. Sometimes I’ll dream that people are breaking into my house and I can’t make enough noise to wake S. up. Sometimes I’ll have dreams that I’m being kidnapped and I’m calling my family to tell them where I am but I have no voice to talk even though my lips are moving. The nightmares vary but I’m always mute and it’s horrifying.

The two guys took me to the side of the building nearest us and pinned me down on the ground on my back. I actually didn’t panic. When they laid me on the ground I remember what I had been told in my study abroad orientation program, “If you’re being robbed don’t fight back because your attackers may have a weapon.” So I stayed as still as can be while they went through all my pockets. I was wearing a big winter coat and they took my cell phone, my keys and some loose change from the outer pockets. I absolutely did not move while they did that. But when one of them tried to reach a hand under my coat I completely freaked out. They only thought going through my mind at that point was, “I would rather die than be raped.”

I reacted instantly to the hand trying to go under my coat and I think they were extremely caught off guard since up until that point I hadn’t moved a muscle. A huge adrenaline rush surged through me and I started thrashing violently. I caught them so by surprise that I managed to get flipped over onto my stomach and they lost a hold on covering my mouth. I also kicked one of them REALLY hard (I think it may have been a shin I made contact with but I’m not sure) and I was wearing boots with a pointed toe. I get some satisfaction out of knowing that the guy probably went home with a terribly nasty bruise. Nobody picks a fight with me and gets out unscathed.

Anyways, as soon I got flipped over and they weren’t covering my mouth anymore I started screaming at the top of my lungs. They immediately got up and sprinted away.

As I stood up, watching them flee, I started yelling (all in English, I barely spoke Spanish that early on in my trip) out obscenities. I’m pretty sure I said something along the lines of, “That’s right BLEEPS, run away mother BLEEPERS! BLEEPING BLEEPHOLES, Don’t BLEEP BLEEP with me!” My first emotion was PURE rage, as you can tell.

But that only lasted an instant, and then the stupidest thing came out of my mouth, still in English, “Wait! Why did you take my keys?!? I neeeeeed those!” And with that, I burst into tears. Once I started there was no stopping me and I quickly became hysterical.

I walked past the bus stops sobbing and nobody even glanced my way. I finally ran into a policeman. He stopped and looked concerned but the language barrier was too huge to begin with and on top of that I was so upset I couldn’t even understand my own thoughts…let alone a stranger speaking a foreign language to me. I’m sure he was asking me what was wrong, but what do I know. The conversation very well could’ve gone like this:

Policeman: “If I give you tea and cookies will you stop crying stupid Gringa?”
Me: “Gurgleblurble areb lksdfoieks, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.”
Policeman: “Ok, I’ll take that as a yes. I can’t wait to tell my friends that I asked a blond on a date and she said si! Right this way.”

That was probably pretty close to what he said because the first thing that happened when we got to the police station was him bringing me a tray of cookies and offering me tea and telling me that I was pretty.

After hours of me continuing to cry and eat cookies and not understand anything, I finally sort of communicated what had happened and they made me fill out the most ridiculous police report ever. I didn’t know my own address in Chile, I didn’t know my passport number…I probably spelled my own name wrong too. And I definitely didn’t know any vital information on identifying characteristics of my attackers.

“Suspects have brown hair and one is wearing jeans, and one is wearing gloves.”

Sure, good luck with that. I bet they were able to catch the bad guys. Yep.

Around 3:30am I finished at the police station and they tried to bring me to my host family’s house. I say “tried” because we drove around in circles for at least 45 minutes while I looked for my house. I was so disoriented that I had no idea where my home was in relation to the police station. When we finally found the building of course by that time it was 4:30am and I had no idea what apartment number I lived in. So I just buzzed EVERY SINGLE BUZZER in the building. Various people answered and I just kept saying, “Me llamo Kyle,” hoping somebody would figure out who I belonged to. Sure enough, my host mom came down to let me in…and the look on her face was priceless. She was SHOCKED. I mean, c’mon, wouldn’t you have been? Here I am, this gringa that she’s known less than 24 hours. I come home and my face is streaked with eyeliner, I’m accompanied by two policemen and my eyes are so squinty and red from crying I can barely see. She probably thought I had been arrested for prostitution or drug abuse…or both.

I didn’t have the Spanish to tell her or my program directors about what had really happened. I mean, they figured out that I was robbed, but almost everybody in the program gets at least a cell phone stolen from them eventually, so nobody made a fuss at all.

It took me a while to be able to tell them all the details in Spanish and then they all freaked out…but that was like 6 months after the incident and by that time I was mostly over it.

So now I’m a paranoid safety freak. I don’t go anywhere by myself after dark. Every time I hear footsteps my heart jumps into my throat…which is actually kind of weird because I don’t have any actual memory of hearing my attackers approach but it must be deeply ingrained in my subconscious because I am now the most easily startled person alive.

I thank God that I wasn’t raped or injured or even killed. But, one thing definitely did take a beating — my faith in the humanity. To this day it’s still in recovery and I’m not sure that it will ever fully recuperate.