Daily Mail
January 5, 2014
A 26-year-old Florida woman may never walk again after her kind gesture to offer a stranger a ride to the hospital turned into a nightmare attack that has ruined her life.
Tallahassee-resident Katie Schlinger told her traumatic story to MailOnline, revealing details about the night she offered to drive a stranger to the hospital before ‘he physically and sexually attacked her’.
Ms Schlinger says she fought back and escaped with her life, but two spinal surgeries later, she still can’t use her right arm or walk on her own. And since she’s uninsured, she already owes one hospital $250,000 and is about to be kicked out of a third.
It all goes back to December 20 when Ms Schlinger was in Aiken, South Carolina, to support her brother as he underwent open heart surgery at Aiken Regional Medical Center.
She was smoking a cigarette in the car at the nearby Quality Inn around 4am when she was approached by 23-year-old Michael Antwon Fuller who asked her for a cigarette and the two started talking about their relatives in the hospital.
Fuller told her he was worried about his uncle at the hospital and wondered if she wouldn’t mind driving him up there so he could see him.
‘Yeah I’ll give you a ride if you promise not to hurt me,’ she joked, agreeing to drive him since the hospital was only four minutes away and Fuller was clean cut, well-spoken and well dressed.
‘Who could hurt that precious face?’ Ms Schlinger recalls him responding.
As they drove up to the hospital, Ms Schlinger began to turn into the main entrance but Fuller told her it was a different entrance. The second entrance was the emergency entrance and he told her not to turn there either, she told MailOnline.
From there the road went pitch black and when Ms Schlinger turned to tell him she didn’t think there was another entrance, he allegedly hit her face with the mouth of his gun.
Ms Schlinger says she started to cry and begged him to take her car or her money, but she says he told her to just keep driving and hit her on the head with his pistol.
She agreed and started driving but slowly moved her hand to the door handle. She hit the gas right before she opened the door and hurled herself out of the moving vehicle.
By the time she stopped rolling and got up, Fuller had somehow put the car in park and caught up with her, she said.
Outside of the car, she says he pointed his gun at her and forced her to perform oral sex.
‘I kept begging him not to rape me,’ she said. Hoping to save herself, she offered to drive him to an ATM and give him all the money in her bank account.