LAKEWOOD, Colo. (WSVN) — A woman at a Colorado movie theater was beaten up by a teenage girl following a showing where the victim had confronted the alleged assailant and her friends for being loud.
Days after Tuesday night’s attack, Heather Piper still has a dark, black eye. A photo taken in the immediate aftermath of the incident showed her face covered in bruises.
Piper said the attack left her bleeding. “I had blood all over my face. It was all the way down to my shirt, all the way down to my shoes,” she said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a black eye,” Piper added.
Piper said the teen who beat her up was among a group that was crawling over seats and being loud during the movie. “I asked them to be quiet several times, and they wouldn’t, and I finally just yelled at them to shush.”
According to Piper, another moviegoer told security about the teens, which kept the group quiet for the rest of the movie.
But as Piper and her two friends left, one of the teens confronted her. “She’s screaming and just punched me on the side of the head,” she said.
Piper said she didn’t fight back because she’s a foster parent and didn’t want to jeopardize her license. “I said, ‘What are you doing? What is wrong with you?’ And she lost it,” she said. “She started hitting me again and she started crying saying, ‘Well, you called me ‘ghetto.'”
When asked by a reporter whether she called the alleged assailant “ghetto” prior to the beating, Piper replied. “I probably did.”
Eventually, the teen ran off, leaving Piper with a fractured nose, several bruises and scratches. “For someone to not have the mental capacity to use their words to express themselves, to immediately have to go into violence, is a scary thing,” she said.
Police are reviewing surveillance video from the multiplex in the hopes that it will help them in their investigation.
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