A 24-year-old woman says she was shocked and thrown from a west Little Rock electrical tower after climbing it to escape a sexual assault early Tuesday morning, according to the Little Rock Police Department.
There is no way for police to say if the incident is related to the west Little Rock power outage that also occurred early Tuesday, spokesman Lt. Richard Hilgeman said.
Police responded to an assault report at 4:13 a.m. at the Promenade at Chenal, 17625 Chenal Parkway, where an officer made contact with a woman who appeared to be burned all over, according to the report.
The woman told police she climbed a electrical tower, located near 17316 Kanis Road, to escape a sexual assault by an unidentified black man who worked at Wal-Mart and drove a gold Toyota Camry or Corolla, according to the report.
The woman appeared to be very agitated, police said, and was transported to Baptist Health Medical Center for treatment.
An officer later followed up with the woman at the hospital who told him she walked to Wal-Mart to use a phone to call her boyfriend for a ride home, according to the report.
The woman said she made contact with the man, whose name she does not know but who has given her a couple of rides before, according to the report. The woman then asked him for a ride to her boyfriend's house, she told police.
They started driving southeast on Chenal Parkway when the man took out a small, silver semi-automatic pistol and pointed it at her head, the woman told police. He said he would kill her if she did not perform a sex act, adding that it was payback for "all of the things her people had done to his people for centuries," the woman told police.
When they stopped at a traffic light, the woman said she got out of the vehicle and ran west toward the power station, according to the report. She scaled the barbed wire fence and started to climb the tower before she was electrocuted and thrown from the structure, the woman told police.
The woman said she then ran to the Promenade at Chenal, where she made contact with somebody who called the police, according to the report.
Medical swabs were taken for any trace of DNA evidence, according to the report. The woman was transferred to the burn unit at Arkansas Children's Hospital for further treatment, police said.
Tuesday morning's power failure started around 3:30 a.m. and was caused by an unauthorized person who entered a substation on Kanis Road near Chenal Parkway, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette previously reported.
