(Karalie Red Old Man was attacked and beaten in front of her daughter by two men in what police are calling an incident of road rage.)
Kathleen Martens
APTN National News
The mother of the victim of a brutal hockey-stick road-rage attack in Calgary says her daughter is bruised, battered and afraid to leave the house.
“She is mentally and physically exhausted,” Sandra Sparvier said Friday from her home on the Siksika First Nation southeast of Calgary. “She’s in a lot of pain and feeling frightened.”
The attack occurred Wednesday outside the Mount Pleasant Sportsplex. Sparvier said her daughter’s husband was also hurt, when he came out of the facility to see what was happening.
“This whole thing is very scary. It’s hard to believe it happened.”
Her daughter, Karalie Red Old Man, was swollen and in pain Friday after receiving stitches to her mouth. She told APTN a man smashed the windows of her minivan with a hockey stick, pulled her out of the car and beat her in front of her nine-year-old daughter who was in the back seat.
Calgary police described it as “road rage” after the men in a BMW followed the woman’s vehicle into the parking lot of the arena before the attack. Red Old Man, 28, said the driver struck the back of her Dodge Caravan minivan twice but accused her of driving into him.
“I have three stitches in my lip . . . and my lip is infected right now and it’s getting bigger. It’s hard for me to eat and drink and talk,” Red Old Man said in a telephone interview with APTN.
“I’m feeling a sharp pain in my chest. I’m just waiting for x-ray results.”
Red Old Man says she was praying her husband would be outside the arena when she arrived but he wasn’t. She said the driver of the other car was angry and outside her van, accusing her of damaging his vehicle.
“He told me that while banging on the window and telling me to get out of the vehicle and I told him, ‘No. I wasn’t the one at fault here. You’re the one that hit me twice and you rear ended me.’”
She said she cracked open the driver’s side window and was yelling back at him when the window rolled all the way down and he grabbed her hair and the back of her head.
“He smashed my head on the door (frame). He did that about five or six times, and while that was happening my daughter was screaming at him to stop. She was crying but he wouldn’t stop.”
She’s not sure how the door opened and he pulled her out but she says the van was rolling and she twisted her body to get back in and put the van in park.
“There was no one around,” she said while starting to cry. “He was using his fists and hitting me on my neck and arm.”
Red Old Man says she grabbed the hockey stick in the van to defend herself with and the attacker tried to wrestle it away from her. “I was trying to get away from him but he was holding my jacket and I couldn’t do anything.”
She says she could hear her daughter screaming and was hoping someone would come out of the arena.
“He punched me a couple of times in my left arm. I used the stick just to buy some time until someone could help me. I hit him a couple of times with it.”
She figured out the two men were brothers and says her attacker told the other to get in the silver, two-door, BMW and take off. She says the other man then took the stick away from her and used it to smash the windows in her van.
That’s when her husband came out of the building with the couple’s other children. Red Old Man says her husband left the children with other hockey parents and then tried pulling the man off her.
“Then that guy was throwing punches at my husband who was asking what was going on. He wouldn’t talk; he was just angry.”
She says she tried to pull the man off her husband but he threw her to the ground. She says she had her phone and was trying to open the camera to take a picture of the BMW’s licence plate.
That’s when she says the man left her husband on the ground and tried to grab her phone.
“I wouldn’t let it go and then he got scared and they both jumped in the vehicle trying to reverse while I was behind. He nicked my leg a little bit. I jumped out of the way so I didn’t get run over. If I stayed there he would have run over me.”
The men sped off before the police could arrive. Red Old Man says her attackers looked young, maybe in their 20s. She says they had olive skin, facial hair and dark eyes.
“I couldn’t see more because it was dark out and they broke my glasses.”
Police are searching for a BMW with an Alberta licence plate. They say the car would likely have extensive damage to the front passenger side and possibly the front bumper.
