A Philadelphia woman says a stranger tried to kick her in the face during an early-morning run Wednesday. He did not get very far with the idea.
Maggie Lawrence, 24, told 6abc she was running along the 500 block of 16th Street in Center City around 6:30 a.m. when she heard someone yelling through her headphones. As she passed a man on the street, Lawrence said he raised his leg toward her face.
Lawrence reacted quickly enough to catch his foot before it hit her. She said the man stood there laughing while she held onto it, so she threw his foot back down and ran away. She was not injured.
The attempted kick itself is not shown in the publicly released surveillance footage. A nearby camera captured Lawrence running shortly before the encounter and later recorded a man walking south on 16th Street. Philadelphia Police South Detectives are investigating, and no public identification or arrest had been announced as of Saturday.
A Fast Reaction
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Lawrence said the man did not initially stand out as a threat. She described him as about 6 feet tall with dark hair, wearing navy gym clothes and tennis shoes with white soles.
He looked, in her telling, like an ordinary person who might have been coming home from the gym.
Then she heard the yelling.
As Lawrence ran past him, she said he stopped and brought his leg up toward her head in what she described as a karate-style kick. Lawrence realized what was happening quickly enough to grab his foot before it reached her face.
For a moment, that left the two of them in the unusual position of Lawrence standing in the street holding the stranger’s foot while he laughed.
She dropped it and kept moving.
Lawrence told 6abc she normally carries mace when she runs, but after stopping the kick, she chose to get away instead.
What Cameras Saw
The surveillance video provides useful bookends to Lawrence’s account rather than footage of the encounter itself.
It shows Lawrence running before the alleged attack. The camera later captures a man walking south, giving police an image of the person Lawrence says tried to kick her.
The released footage and still images also show visible tattoos on the man’s arm and lower leg. Those features, along with the clothing and physical description Lawrence provided, give police more to work with than a description alone.
They have not, however, publicly put a name to him.
That has not stopped people online from trying. Some social-media users have claimed to recognize the man or associate him with a particular gym based on his tattoos and appearance. Those claims have not been confirmed by Philadelphia Police, so they remain internet identification attempts rather than established facts.
Lawrence said she moved to Philadelphia earlier this summer and runs every morning. She had generally considered the area quiet and safe, with other runners and people heading to work around at that hour.
Her headphones also became a focus of online reaction after the story aired. In Lawrence’s account, though, she heard the yelling through them and recognized the incoming kick quickly enough to stop it.
A Separate Scare
The encounter came amid another unusual stretch of headlines involving people on foot in Center City, although police have given no indication the cases are connected.
On Aug. 12, Philadelphia Police said a masked man chased a 40-year-old woman near the 1500 block of JFK Boulevard at about 5:30 a.m. The woman fell and was injured after the man made threatening comments while pursuing her, according to a Philadelphia Police wanted notice.
Police later identified that suspect as 22-year-old Zymire Hughes.
U.S. Marshals arrested Hughes in Las Vegas on Aug. 25, one day before Lawrence’s encounter. The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office said Hughes is accused of a series of assaults and threats in Center City and was awaiting extradition to Philadelphia.
Nothing released by police connects Hughes to the man Lawrence encountered. The timing simply put a second strange early-morning encounter involving a woman in Center City into the news almost immediately after an arrest in the earlier case.
Lawrence wants the man from her encounter identified before someone else crosses his path.
“People need to be on the lookout, and hopefully we’re able to catch him,” she said.