The President of the Association of Judicial Reporters (AJUR), Temple of Justice, Monrovia, Natasha Yassah Wright, has reportedly been attacked by a group of youths believed to be zogoes [street thugs].
According to her, she left her office, the Inprofile Daily, located on the Capitol By-Pass, at about 9:00 p.m. on Thursday going home, but noticed that she was getting late because of the slow pace of the car she was riding in. Therefore, upon reaching the boulevard intersection in Paynesville, she and others got down to board another car in order to get to their 72nd residents much sooner. She stated, “When a lady and myself got down, who is my neighbor, while walking we noticed a group of men, about 11 in number, walking toward us.”
At that point, two of the young men walked toward her, Yassah, and asked her for her phone which was in her hand.
“I said no! So we started fighting over the phone in my hand,” she explained her ordeal. She stated that during the tussle between her and the criminal, the lady (both of them walked together), upon seeing the group of men approaching them, threw her handbag away and started running away, shouting for help. She told Yassah not to resist but to give her bag to the boys before they harmed her.
“The statement my neighbor made, ‘Give your bag up,’ gave the boys courage as they continued the attack on me,” Yassah added.
According to her, as she continued fighting back, the men who were trying to take her belongings—one of them surprisingly took a rock from the ground, even though they were behaving like they had some weapons with them, and cut her with the rock, while one of them hit her on her chest and another on her from the back and shoulder.
She explained that they overpowered her, took away her phones, her identification card, and her unchecked Liberian dollars, among others.
Displaying the cut she got from the incident, she said later on she reported the unforeseen situation to the police station but stated that, unfortunately for her, when she and the police officer went on the scene they had already fled.