An Indiana youth baseball coach spoke on Wednesday about how shocked he and his community are in the wake of the stabbing of a teen girl at a local baseball game perpetrated by an illegal alien who had been deported at least once before.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I see this dude just come out of behind my dugout, and all he did was just jump on this girl,” coach Matt Ramian told Fox & Friends on Wednesday, “and then he started to… push her down under the bleachers, and then he pulls out at least a 16 to 20-inch knife.”
The attack occurred on Saturday at a baseball field in Lowell, Indiana, in the northwest part of the state, about an hour southeast of Chicago.
“It wasn’t even a regular-sized pocket knife, and just started swinging it and got her a few times, and blood went all over the bleachers and on the people sitting in front of them,” the coach said. “Then he just takes off running down the sidelines and started waving the knife at a couple other people as he was running.”
Ramian said that a dozen men started running after the assailant once they knew what was going on, and an intense manhunt was launched to capture him.
On Sunday, Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez Jr. reported that Dimas Gabriel Yanez, 26, an illegal alien from Honduras, had been apprehended and charged with attempted murder. Officials also found that he had been deported out of the U.S. once before for criminal activity.
“Investigators have learned Yanez had been deported to Honduras in 2018 and may have been engaged in criminal activity across the United States since returning to the country illegally,” the department said in a statement.
Coach Ramian said the attack shocked everyone in the northwest Indiana area, and as a result, he insisted, “You change your views on a lot of things.”
The teenage girl who was attacked was treated and released with a wound to her hand, and Ramian added that she went back to school right away because “she wanted to be strong.”
“All the boys were kind of shocked,” he added. “They’re all strong kids… They’re only 12 years old, but at the same time… something like that happens… It’s something that adults shouldn’t see, but… for these kids to see that [it] just makes it a little bit harder and makes you a little bit more emotional for them.”
“Lowell is one of those little close-knit towns,” Ramian said. “They have a big Labor Day weekend… music festival. They have fireworks shows, parades every day, something different, and… it’s one of those towns where everybody knows everybody.”
“So… for something like this to happen was shocking,” he continued. “Just not for Lowell, but for all the communities around them.”
A GoFundMe has been set up to help the family pay for medical expenses.
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