Features

The 75-year-old woman whose throat was slashed with a butcher knife while walking outside the Berkeley Rose Garden last week said she is on her way to a full recovery. 

“I’m doing quite well and my voice is back,” said the grandmother of seven, who wished not to reveal her name. 

On Friday police arrested a 16-year-old Oakland woman on attempted murder in connection with the incident. Police would not give the identity of the suspect because she is a juvenile. 

“I’m immensely relieved that she’s in custody,” the woman said Monday. 

She recounted the ordeal as she rested Monday at her north Berkeley home, a few blocks from the site where she was assaulted. 

She said she was walking home Wednesday with her husband, also 75, from a UC Berkeley cinema class when two women approached her from the opposite direction. 

“One of them just grabbed me around the neck and attacked me out of the blue,” she said. “I was astonished. At first I didn’t realize I had been stabbed, but then I saw the blood spurting out.” 

She said the slasher released her and continued walking south on Euclid Avenue. She called for her husband who had been walking behind her. 

“I yelled at him to come and then realized I should probably be lying down so I went down on the sidewalk and started yelling, ‘help, help.”  

The two women fled in a BMW convertible, according to police. 

The attack left the victim with “a long slash,” but the knife struck a bone in her throat that doctors told her might have shielded her from a life-threatening injury. 

“I was extremely fortunate,” she said. “It missed my trachea, my esophagus and any major arteries.” 

After being rushed to Highland Hospital, she remained in intensive care for two days with a breathing tube inserted into her throat. 

The attacker did not say a word or reach for her purse, the woman said. 

The person who accompanied the attacker has been identified, but will not be charged, said Berkeley Police Public Information Officer Joe Okies. 

Okies declined to discuss possible motives. 

Councilmember Betty Olds, who lives near the Rose Garden, said she understood from talking to authorities that the incident was not gang related and that the car was not stolen.  

“It looks like she was deranged,” Olds said.  

The victim, who works part time at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, said she was raised in Berkeley and although she was shaken by what happened, it hasn’t soured her on her neighborhood. 

“I was shocked that something like this could happen to anyone in Berkeley,” she said. “But I think north Berkeley is a wonderful place to live and I’m not leaving.”