‘I feel extremely lucky,’ says man who survived hatchet attack

Rawley Walker went into “survival mode” when two strangers attacked him, with one ultimately hitting him in the head with a hatchet, on a North End sidewalk Friday.

Walker, 23, said he bit off an assailant’s fingertip when the men randomly jumped him while he walked home with a takeout pizza box in his hands on Selkirk Avenue, near Andrews Street.

“I was just in ‘fight or flight.’ It was just survival mode and instincts,” he told the Free Press Monday. “I feel extremely lucky (to be alive).”

Walker said he has a large wound on his forehead, three fractures to his skull and is traumatized. He and his partner plan to move out of the neighbourhood.

“This area is now tainted in our memories. We don’t feel safe opening our front door,” he said.

No one had been arrested as of Monday morning, said Winnipeg Police Service spokesman Const. Stephen Spencer.

Walker encountered the two men after he left a pizza restaurant at about 5 p.m. He said he wondered if they were intoxicated because they screamed at a fire truck for being “too loud” when it passed by with its lights and siren on moments earlier.

“They jumped me for (the pizza),” Walker said. “I kind of froze and pushed them away, and dropped the pizza because I’m like, ‘This isn’t worth it,’ but at that point it was too late.”

One of the attackers put him in a chokehold, while the other man punched and kicked him. A woman who was with the pair shouted at them to stop, Walker said.

“I remember I bit the tip of his finger off because he was choking me out while I was getting whaled on from above,” he said. “I was like, ‘I have nothing I can do here other than this,’ so I had to chomp the tip of his finger off. That brought the hatchet into play from the other dude.”

Walker said when the hatchet hit his forehead, it opened a large gash and blood streamed down his face. He managed to disarm the man, while he continued to fight back.

Walker said the man then hit him over the head with a glass bottle, which shattered.

“Apparently, one weapon isn’t enough,” he said. Walker estimated the attack lasted about a minute.

He managed to free himself and run to the fire truck that had passed by a few minutes earlier. Witnesses went inside a building and alerted firefighters, who came to his aid while attending to an unrelated incident.

Walker said a witness took off their jacket and handed it to him, so he could use it to apply pressure to his head wound.

Paramedics took him to Health Sciences Centre, where staff closed the wound with stitches, and did a CT scan.

Walker recalled hearing an emergency services worker say the outcome would have been much worse if the fire crew hadn’t been nearby.

“In the ambulance, they said, ‘He’s losing a lot of blood.’ They took the blood loss extremely seriously,” he said.

Walker doesn’t know how many stitches he received. He said hospital staff told him he had three skull fractures that should heal naturally. A follow-up appointment was scheduled for a later date.

He went home later that night but was unable to fall asleep until about 7 a.m. Saturday.

“Every time I closed my eyes, there were flashbacks,” said Walker, who has suffered severe headaches since the attack.

His wound was itchy and had an odd sensation. “It feels like there is still a wedge in my skull, so to speak, as if (the hatchet) is just sticking in there,” Walker said.

He was grateful to the witnesses, and emergency services and hospital staff who helped or treated him. He encouraged people to keep their “head on a swivel” to be aware of their surroundings.

Walker and his partner, who’ve lived in the North End for just under a year, were scheduled to view a rental property in a different neighbourhood Monday night.

Walker, who has an anxiety disorder that causes occasional anxiety attacks, has a service dog.

“I will not even leave the house alone without my service dog now. My dog doesn’t even want me to go out alone now,” he said. “Now, it’s even more important to me now.”

Walker gave a statement to detectives from the major crimes unit Monday.

“This appears to be an isolated incident with no public safety concerns,” Spencer, the police spokesman, wrote in an email to the Free Press.

Winnipeg police received 14,345 reports of violent crimes between November 2024 to October 2025 (the latest 12-month period for which statistics are available), an online dashboard shows.

The total was about six per cent lower than that of the previous 12-month period, and about nine per cent higher than the five-year average.

In the William Whyte neighbourhood, where Walker was attacked, reports of violent crime were down nine per cent against the area’s five-year average.

Police increased enforcement in the neighbourhood for several weeks in early 2025, following several violent incidents, including three homicides.

The William Whyte Neighbourhood Association launched an anonymous phone tip line last fall to encourage people to report crime and suspicious activity.

Darrell Warren, the association president, said residents continue to work with police and Crime Stoppers to make the area safer.

“It’s unfortunate that this happened,” he said about the attack against Walker.

chris.kitching@freepress.mb.ca