‘I Never Thought I’d Be a Victim,’ Hampden Township Woman Says of Attack in Harrisburg Parking Garage

A Hampden Township couple was attacked early Saturday in the River Street Garage in Harrisburg.

The 19-year-old Hampden Township woman thought nothing of the three men standing outside a parked car as she drove her friends out of the River Street Garage in downtown Harrisburg early Saturday.

But suddenly the car jerked backward, trapping her on the second floor. The men dragged her husband and a friend from the car and began pummeling them, she said.

“I jumped out and tried to stop it, thinking, ‘I’m a girl, they’re not going to hit me,'” said the woman, who fears retaliation and didn’t want her name used. “Then a fist came at me.”

The next thing the petite, 5-foot 3-inch brunette remembers is waking up face down on the cement, with blood dripping from her eye. She’d find out later she had a concussion and broken nose.

Harrisburg police told the woman she might have been the victim of a gang-initiation ritual, since she and her friends were randomly jumped by the group, and nothing–not even their wallets in plain sight inside her car–were taken.

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It’s the second violent act in the past two months at the garage, located off Second Street. On Sept. 3, a 30-year-old woman was mugged and choked until she was unconscious.

And in January at the South Street Garage, a woman and her male friend were severely beaten and mugged as they were leaving on an early Saturday. The woman’s friend had a broken nose and needed 20 stitches to close a large gash between his eyes and one across his forehead.

In the most recent beating, the woman and her 21-year-old husband, newlyweds with a 6-month-old daughter, counted at least a dozen teens and young men who viciously jumped them and their two friends as they were leaving after a night on Restaurant Row.

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Harrisburg police say they are looking for information about an attack that occurred at the River Street Garage in downtown Harrisburg early Saturday.

Police say that a 19-year-old woman called Harrisburg Police the morning of Oct. 9 to report that she and her 21-year-old husband, both of Mechanicsburg, were beaten and robbed the night before in the parking garage when they went back to their car at about 1:30 a.m.

Police say the woman told them that as they were driving out they stopped on the third floor to let a car back out of a space and were confronted by about 10 young black males and attacked for no reason. {snip} The woman’s husband lost his wedding ring in the attack.

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