\I'm going to pull the hat off. You run and you don't turn around,"" Dina Marie's rapist warned her before he let her go. ""Don't look at my car. Don't look at my license plate. The man pulled off the black hat he had used to cover Dina Marie's eyes. Immediately, she heard the door slam and the car drive away.
She took off running.
Obeying his orders, she darted down a slight hill, never looking back. Hands flailing in the air, she struggled to keep her balance, almost falling on Observatory Drive.
Tears clouded her vision. Her eyes had been closed and blindfolded for almost the entire two hours she had been held against her will.
""Help me!"" she cried hysterically to the first girl she spotted. Dina Marie's tears and thrashing arms frightened the girl, who was alone.
""Help me! I've been mugged!"" Dina Marie yelled.
Dina Marie gave the girl her keys. She had kept them clenched in her hand while she was kidnapped and raped. ""Take me back to my dorm. I have my keys,"" she said.
It was Wednesday, Nov. 29 at 6:45 p.m., and Dina Marie was walking back from the French House on Frances Street where she eats dinner every week. In her jeans, knee-high black boots and red European jacket, she made her way toward Van Vleck. She carried her notes to a calculus review for the exam she had the following day.
She left the review at about 7:45 p.m. hoping to catch the 81 bus on Charter Street and take it to Tripp Circle, near her dorm.
""I saw the bus coming as I was walking up Charter. I started running after it but it kept going and I missed it,"" Dina Marie said. ""I ran after it for probably a block ... the bus only comes every 15, 20 minutes.""
So Dina Marie decided to walk.
Instead of taking the Lakeshore path commonly referred to as ""rape shore,"" Dina Marie headed down Observatory Drive at about 8 p.m. She remembers five other students walking on the same street. There were two girls talking behind her as she walked down the stairs, near the back of her building.
Dina Marie suddenly sensed movement in her peripheral vision. A body slammed into hers. Before she could spit a sarcastic ""excuse me,"" a man wearing a puffy coat grabbed her. She let out a cry for help before a hand covered her mouth. The man pulled out a knife and held it against her throat.
""The very first thing I thought was, ‘I'm about to be a statistic,'"" Dina Marie said.
Dina Marie assumed she was being muggedA-.
Her attacker threatened her, telling her not to say a word.
The man slid a black hat over her head to cover her eyes. He put his puffy coat with a large fur hood on her and zipped it all the way up. He dragged her to his car with her head down. Dina Marie said she wondered how no one on Observatory Drive saw her.
The seat in the car was fully reclined and Dina Marie was forced to lay on her stomach with her hands tied by a belt. As she lay bound and blind, she told herself, ""Rule number one Dina Marie, start paying attention to where you're driving."" With that, Dina Marie began to count turns and mentally track the route the car was taking.
But she couldn't contain her terror.
""The scariest thing about it is, the whole time I was in his car and driving away, I just remember thinking ‘I'm totally alone right now. Nobody knows where I am. My parents are together. My brother is with other people. My friends are sitting at my dorm. Everybody is with someone or someone knows where they are, and no one knows where I am. Not a single person.'""
Her attacker asked her questions, but Dina Marie tried not to answer him. The heavy jacket and hat muffled his voice and she told him it was hard to hear him.
If she asked where they were going and when she would be back, he threatened to physically force her silence.
While they drove, the man repeated that if she did everything he said, he would bring her back.
This assurance was all Dina Marie had to hold on to. She had to trust her kidnapper.
""I had to think and believe I was going to be brought back because I didn't want to sit there and think, ‘I'm going to die,'"" she said.
Suddenly the car stopped. The man dragged her out and led her to the door of an apartment.
She stood there waiting, unsure of what was to come, until she was pulled into a dim bedroom.
Although Dina Marie had been paying attention to every detail in the car, she did everything she could to block out what was happening to her. She didn't want memories, nightmares. Although police believe Dina Marie was in her attacker's apartment for a half-hour to an hour, Dina Marie said it felt like only a few minutes.
""I would just think about my parents, my friends, my boyfriend, my family, my school, my calculus exam,"" Dina Marie said. ""I was thinking, ‘what's the equation for finding the integral of this?'""
