Child Helps Foil Knife Attack On Brighton Park Mom
(CBS) -- A suspect armed with a knife attacked a Brighton Park mother and her 8-year-old daughter, who helped fend off the suspect and get help.
Family members told their frightening story to CBS 2's Suzanne Le Mignot.
Bruise marks on her neck. Cuts on her scalp. Broken blood vessels in an eye.
These are the injuries this mother says suspect Jessie White caused when he violently attacked her.
The mother had been walking her young daughter home from school. She says she and her child were smiling and laughing while talking about getting a new puppy.
That's when White allegedly jumped off some church steps, where he had been sitting.
"He came up behind me. He covered my face with his left hand and put the knife to my neck with his right hand," says the mother, who is not being identified in this report.
She says White dragged her down an alley, into the basement of an apartment building. Her daughter, two belts away from being a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, tried to fight White, even throwing her backpack at him.
Then the second-grader ran nearly a block to get her father.
The suspect, meanwhile, "started to bash my head into the concrete floor ... Then he started to choke me," the injured mother says.
When she begged him to stop and said she had a daughter, he replied: "I'm gonna kill you. Shut up."
Her husband got to the alley and heard her screams from the basement.
"As soon as I stepped in the doorway, he ran at me," her spouse says.
He held the suspect down. The mother says she's grateful for her daughter's efforts.
"She's a really strong person. She's really determined. She's brave," she says.
Mom did a good job, too. White never knew she grabbed the blade of the knife, pulling it out of the handle. All the while, he thought he was stabbing her, she says.
He's now charged with multiple counts of battery and attempted murder.
