Kim Glass ex Olympic volleyball player beaten by L.A homeless man with metal pipe as she warns about mental illness in Instagram post pervading the crime ridden city.
A former volleyball medal winning Olympian is recovering after incurring horrific facial injuries after being attacked by a homeless man who threw a metal pipe at her in Los Angeles over the weekend.
The 37-year-old former athlete detailed Saturday’s attack on Instagram as she showed her right eye swollen shut, blackened and stitched up, along with a noticeable gash on her nose.
‘I do have multiple fractures,’ Kim Glass said of her injuries, which the former volleyball player, initially feared would leave her blind in the right eye.
‘Yes I look like ET,’ joked Glass, who has previously appeared in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue as well as ESPN’s The Body Issue.
Glass detailed how she was leaving lunch in downtown L.A. when she was approached by a homeless man.
Crime ridden Los Angeles
‘He had something in his hand,’ she said of the homeless man who ‘just ran up.’
‘And he just looked at me with some pretty hateful eyes,’ Glass recalled.
‘As I turned to tell my friend, ‘I think something’s wrong with him and I think he’s going to hit the car’ — before I knew it, a big metal bolt-like pipe hit me,’ she said.
“It happened so fast. He literally flung it from the street,” said the retired volleyball player, who helped Team USA win silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
‘It kinda took me down and out,’ Glass said, relaying how other people nearby ‘got him and held him down until the cops came.’
The athlete — who has previously lived in Russia, Puerto Rico, Turkey, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, China and Brasil — made clear that it’s hard not to live in fear in the crime-ridden one-time City of Angeles.
Despite the close call that could have blinded her or worse, Glass urged locals to be safe among the ever increasing degree of mentally ill people in the streets.
‘Guys, just be safe out there … there’s a lot of mentally ill people on these streets right now,’ she said in a second video.
‘You shouldn’t have to be fearful when you walk, but it’s true. You guys just be safe, OK,’ she said, later also writing that she was grateful because it ‘could have been SO much worse.’
Violence and decay from mentally ill people being left homeless on the streets of L.A. have been an escalating complaint that has seen many fleeing the city.
