A young woman in Missouri escaped a home in a suburban neighborhood, where she was allegedly held captive and sexually assaulted for a “significant period of time,” authorities say.
A neighbor, Ciara Tharp, told local news KSHB, the young woman appeared at her grandmother’s doorstep early Friday morning pleading for help. “She was terrified,” Tharp said.
She said her grandmother “heard a woman screaming and came knocking on the door, so she opened the door and the lady said, ‘You have to help me, I’ve been raped, I’ve been held captive.'”
“She’s like,” Tharp continued. “‘You gotta help me.'”
“She said, ‘If somebody doesn’t let me in, he’s going to find me and he’s going to kill me,'” Tharp also told another local outlet, KCTV5, which noted that witnesses said the woman had gone door-to-door frantically looking for help.
“My grandma said she had a metal collar around her neck pretty tight,” she said, per KCTV5.
“It was restricting her breathing,” Tharp added. “She had ligature marks on her wrists. She could tell she was pretty weak. She brought her inside and gave her some food and wrapped a blanket around her.”
Lisa Johnson, another neighbor, told KCTV5, “Her face was bound, and she had taken that off.”
“She had some kind of collar device on,” Johnson said. “She told me that she was being held and that the person she was being held by lived up the street.”
Per KSHB, Johnson noted the victim appeared to be malnourished, not weighing more than 100 pounds. Johnson also said that the device on the victim’s neck appeared to be some kind of shock collar.
The woman reportedly told the neighbors she had been held captive in the home and was only able to break free once the man left the house.
“She made the comment that he ‘killed my friends,'” Tharp said, per KCTV5. “‘They didn’t make it. He killed my friends.’ She just kept repeating it.”
The victim made a report to the Excelsior Springs Missouri Police Department soon after getting help, the Clay County Sheriff’s Office said.
Police were told “she had been held against her will and sexually assaulted.”
Later that afternoon authorities obtained a search warrant for the home of Timothy Haslett Jr., per Clay County Sheriff’s Office.
By 9:15 PM Friday night police said Haslett had been charged with “1st degree rape, 1st degree kidnapping and 2nd degree assault in this incident.”
“There are rumors on social media that there are additional deceased victims,” Clay County Sheriff’s Office said. “There is NO EVIDENCE of that at this time.”
Excelsior Springs Police Lt Ryan Dowdy said, per KOAM, “When we made contact with her, it was readily apparent that she had been held against her will for a significant period of time.”
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