Olympic medal-winning volleyball player Kim Glass has revealed horrific facial injuries she suffered when she was almost blinded by a homeless man who threw a metal pipe at her in crime-ridden Los Angeles.
The 37-year-old former athlete and model detailed her nightmare experience from Saturday on Instagram as she showed her right eye completely shut, blackened and stitched up, and with a nasty gash on her nose.
“I do have multiple fractures,” she said of her injuries, which she initially feared would leave her blind in that eye.
“Yes I look like ET,” joked Glass, who has previously appeared in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue as well as ESPN’s The Body Issue.
Glass detailed how she was leaving lunch in downtown LA when she was approached by a homeless man in the city where locals are fighting to recall woke county District Attorney George Gascon because of his soft-on-crime policies allowing disturbed criminals to remain free.
“He had something in his hand,” she said of the homeless man who “just ran up.”
“And he just looked at me with some pretty hateful eyes,” she recalled.
“As I turned to tell my friend, ‘I think something’s wrong with him and I think he’s going to hit the car’ — before I knew it, a big metal bolt-like pipe hit me,” she said.
“It happened so fast. He literally flung it from the street,” said the retired volleyball player, who helped Team USA win silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“It kinda took me down and out,” she said, detailing how other people nearby “got him and held him down until the cops came.”
The athlete — who has previously lived in Russia, Puerto Rico, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, China and Brazil — made clear that it’s hard not to live in fear in the crime-ridden one-time City of Angels.
“Guys, just be safe out there … there’s a lot of mentally ill people on these streets right now,” she said in a second video.
“You shouldn’t have to be fearful when you walk, but it’s true. You guys just be safe, OK,” she said, later also writing that she was grateful because it “could have been SO much worse.”
Violence and decay from mentally ill people being left homeless on the streets of LA have been an escalating complaint that has seen many fleeing the city.
The “Recall George Gascon” campaign last week presented more than 717,000 signed petitions in the hope of triggering a vote to unseat the controversial top prosecutor blamed for putting offenders’ freedom over citizens’ safety.
