A senior beaten and thrown down a flight of stairs before her home was set on fire says her attacker was also her rescuer, and she forgives him.
In an interview with Postmedia from her hospital room on Tuesday, Dora Campbell, 72, says a man assaulted her and her granddaughter at her home near 121 Avenue and 102 Street last Saturday. The attack left her with a broken hip, cuts and bruises on her face, and her home destroyed.
Campbell went downstairs into her basement after hearing her granddaughter Crystal Campbell — who she refers to as her daughter — screaming for her. She saw a man who was an acquaintance, someone she and her daughter had kicked out of the house days before when they called the police.
“He got an axe. He got a knife … and my daughter just screamed, better not hurt my mom,” she says.
Dora Campbell said the man wouldn’t let her leave the basement and threw her down the stairs and onto the cement floor six times, breaking her hip.
“I couldn’t stand up for nothing. I had to push myself against the fridge, and he hit me with a shower curtain (rod). He jabbed my head with it,” she says. “He started yelling, he told me to shut up. And then I started to say a prayer.”
She made the sign of the cross in the Tlicho language, spoken by some Dene people in the Northwest Territories. Then she prayed in English so he could understand.
She asked him what his grandmother would think if she knew what he had done.
“You told me she raised you. How’s she going to feel about it? You better pray to God, God forgive you … I have nothing against you, and then you hit me. I said, ‘You want me to die?’ He says, ‘I’m going to kill both of you,’” Campbell said.
“I said, ‘God, if you’re listening to me, forgive this guy of what he’s doing. Just hope his grandma will forgive him enough. And now all his family rejects him, but I’ve got nothing against him. Just forgive him what he’s going through.’”
She says the man went upstairs and set her house on fire. Crystal Campbell escaped by climbing out the basement window. Dora Campbell also tried to escape by crawling up the stairs, but she didn’t have the strength.
Minutes later, her attacker returned.
“He ran back inside the house, the basement. He told me to put my arm around his neck, and he carried me outside the front stairs,” she says. “He cried, and he held me outside.
“I think I touched his good side.”
She flagged down a neighbour who called police.
Campbell says she forgives her attacker, but hopes he’s caught and put in jail.
She also says she blames the police for what happened, in part, because they “let him back in” after the man was kicked out days before when he lost his temper.
Campbell had hip surgery over the weekend. She has seven stitches in her forehead and was still in hospital on Tuesday. She thanks God she and her daughter are alive.
She started trying to walk as soon as she could after her surgery, even though she was sore. One of the hospital workers asked her if she was “super grandma,” she says.
After her surgery she was sore and numb, but she tried walking as soon as she could.
“I’ll walk if I’m healthy. I’m alive. God wants me to walk, stick my foot on this Earth,” she said. “It hurts, but you have to do it, and I’m doing it. If I’m down, I won’t get up. If I get up, I keep going.”
“I told my grandchildren, grandma’s 72 years old. I could outrun you guys,” she said laughing.
lboothby@postmedia.com
@laurby
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