Woman Raped And Harassed On Train For 40 Minutes, No Witnesses Call Police And Some May Have Even Recorded The Crime

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — Police say a woman was harassed, groped, and eventually raped while traveling on a train just outside Philadelphia. The assault is said to have lasted some 40 minutes over the course of multiple stops, and numerous witnesses did nothing to intervene.

Based on surveillance video, there is evidence that some witnesses may have even taken out their phones to record the assault.

A transit authority employee was the first and only person to call 911, and police were on the scene within 3 minutes and pulled the man off of the woman.

“What we want is everyone to be angry and disgusted and to be resolute about making the system safer,” SEPTA Police Chief Thomas J. Nestel III said at a news conference.

Not only do we have the disgusting acts of the suspect, we also have multiple witnesses who apparently seemed too bothered to even press 3 buttons on their phone to dial 911.

Elizabeth Jeglic, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, researches sexual violence prevention. She said if people feel uncomfortable physically intervening, there are other options like calling the police.

“When we have multiple people, people don’t necessarily intervene,” she said. “However, more recent research actually suggests that looking at video footage of more extreme circumstances that up to 90% of cases we do see people intervening. So it was actually somewhat of an aberration in this case that somebody did not step forward to help this individual.”

A lot of what we do here at Concealed Nation is to bring awareness of how alone we truly can be at times, and it’s up to us as individuals to protect our own safety and wellbeing. Even if we have someone right next to us that’s capable of defending us, it’s still not good enough. If they’re compromised for whatever reason, you become your own first responder.

More and more women are getting involved in the concealed carry world, and branching out to everything self-defense related, such as other tools for self-defense and martial arts training.

While there is no excuse for the suspect’s actions, or the actions of every witness, it’s still sometimes a hard pill to swallow realizing that no one is coming to save us in time.