Joy Mdivo

Sharetha was 7½ months pregnant with twins. A knife at her neck woke her. The neighbor's son pulled her from bed by her hair. He and a friend raped her in turns. He cut her throat twice. Her baby kicked. She gurgled, twitched, played dead. The blade missed her jugular by a hair. Her whole shirt was soaked in blood. She kept it up on the ground until she heard their footsteps running away. That day she had turned in her college term paper, gone to work, and gone to Lamaze class with her mom. She was exhausted. She went to bed. She felt pressure behind her in the bed. A hand under her neck. She thought she was dreaming. Then he pulled her head up by the roots of her hair and put the knife under her chin. "Get up." He walked her downstairs into his mother's apartment. The door was already open. Another man was waiting. She knew the first one only by face. Some days he stood on the front porch when she came home. They made her take off everything. Seven and a half months pregnant, naked in front of two strangers. They laid a blanket on the floor. When she begged him to stop, he told her to shut up or he'd kill her with the knife. When he finished, he called the other one in. She was carrying twin girls. All she could think was that she would never see them. When they let her into the bathroom, she pressed her fingerprints onto every wall she could reach. If she didn't make it, at least someone would know she had been in that apartment. Then they told her to walk to her truck like she normally does. That's when she realized they'd been watching her. They'd been inside her apartment while she was gone. In the video below Sharetha tells the rest of it herself. Where did they take her? They drove her truck out, stopped, and told her she could go. "Take two steps that way." Did she? She ran the other way. "Catch that bitch!" He tackled her and she fell on her stomach. What did he want? "Move your hand so I can leave my mark." The first cut went straight across her throat. Her baby kicked on the left. Then he lifted her head and cut again, at an angle. How did she survive? She gasped, choked, made her body jerk and gurgled like it was her last breath, until she heard their footsteps running away. Then she looked down. Her whole shirt was blood. "Stay calm, get help." She climbed a fence, banged on a stranger's picture window and said: "My name is Sharetha, I'm seven and a half months pregnant, I've been raped, my throat is cut twice. Could you please call 911?" The knife missed her jugular by a little. Within an hour police caught both men driving her truck. Zannsabar Johnson, who cut her throat, got 30 to 50 years. Curtis Jenkins got 25 to 50. Some people will say playing dead was luck. Others will say a woman with her throat open, faking her own death to save two unborn girls, is the strongest thing they've ever heard. Both her daughters are alive today. Could you have stayed that calm?