Sucker punch by stranger sends woman to hospital

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This article was published 26/06/2017 (3365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman is facing a second surgery after getting sucker-punched in the eye by a stranger Sunday afternoon.

Brittney Thomas-Ljungberg was heading to a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown near Rupert Avenue with her boyfriend, when a man walked up to her and took a swing at her face, catching her right eye.

Thomas-Ljungberg didn’t see it coming.

“I got out of the car and I walked around to the sidewalk. I was standing on the sidewalk, facing one way… then I turned back and there was a guy there. The fist was already coming at me,” she said.

Thomas-Ljungberg dropped to the sidewalk and screamed. Her boyfriend, Mike Fox, chased the attacker for a few paces before retreating to Thomas-Ljungberg, calling 911 and rushing her to the Health Sciences Centre.

“[There was] blood everywhere,” he said.

Thomas-Ljungberg doesn’t recall feeling anything — she was in shock — but remembers worrying about the fate of her vision.

“’Am I blind? What’s going to happen?’” she recalled thinking. She held Fox’s shirt to her face in an effort to slow the bleeding.

Thomas-Ljungberg couldn’t see out of the eye as Fox rushed her to the hospital, and as of Monday, hasn’t regained vision in her right eye.

“My vision’s no good,” she said.

Thomas-Ljungberg still doesn’t have a prognosis. She underwent a two-hour surgery Sunday night to stop her eye from bleeding, and now has to wait until Friday to see a retina specialist. Doctors told her they think her retina is partially detached, which would likely mean another operation. Her recovery from the first one is painful, she said.

“It feels like someone takes a handful of sand and rubs it in your eye,” she said. 

‘He’s obviously not getting the help he needs’

Sitting uncomfortably in a Misericordia Health Centre room Monday, Thomas-Ljungberg wore a patch over her stitched-up eye and said she doesn’t blame her attacker.

From the look of bewilderment in his eyes and the gibberish he spoke, Fox knew he wasn’t in a stable mindset. There aren’t enough resources available for people like him who need some sort of help, Thomas-Ljungberg said.

“People that really could use it aren’t safe, and them not being safe results in, sometimes, people like me not being safe,” she said.

Thomas-Ljungberg, a server at Sous Sol and science student at the University of Winnipeg, was in surgery Sunday night when she had planned to be studying for a chemistry course. She’ll have to put her studies and plans to get into medicine on hold to recuperate. This delay comes after she dropped two courses in the winter to take care of her father, former TV host Jon Ljungberg, who suffered from liver-failure complications. 

Her mom, Jan Thomas, hadn’t yet had time to digest the situation. She was in line at Rona when she got the call from Fox.

“People that really could use (help) aren’t safe, and them not being safe results in, sometimes, people like me not being safe.”–Brittney Thomas-Ljungberg on her attacker. 

“It hasn’t set in yet… We just talked in the last week about her MCAT, and here we are, dealing with this,” she said.

Ljungberg, 28, has worked in the Exchange District for about 10 years and has never encountered anything like this. She knows many of the marginalized people in the area.

“They’re nice people, they just have some bad luck or they have an illness that isn’t being dealt with appropriately,” she said. “He’s obviously not getting the help he needs, and I just happened to intersect that at the wrong time.”

Even with the randomness of the attack, the couple can’t help thinking about what they could’ve done differently.

“If we had caught one more red light…” Thomas-Ljungberg said.

Since she has been in hospital, she has received an outpouring of best wishes. 

“People are being really supportive… sending me eye-patch fashions,” she smiled.  

Fox described the perpetrator as about 5-foot-8, skinny, with short brown hair. He was wearing a blue sweater. Cst. Rob Carver of the Winnipeg Police Service said the perpetrator was also described as 18-25 years old and indigenous in appearance.

 Police do not have the suspect in custody.