An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman is recovering after she was beaten and stabbed while on her way to church, News 12 reported. The victim, Betty Ellerby, survived the assault and is expected to recover, but the violence of the encounter has put the focus on the man now charged in connection with the attack on an elderly resident as she set out for a Sunday service.
Ellerby said she had been waiting for a cab near Christopher and Pitkin Avenues on Sunday morning when a man she recognised from her own building approached her without any warning. What had begun as an ordinary wait for a ride to church turned, within moments, into a sudden and brutal attack on a woman in her eighties in a part of the neighbourhood she would have known well.
According to police, 36-year-old Shawnee Moore struck Ellerby twice in the head with a stick and then stabbed her multiple times in the neck. The severity of the assault left the elderly churchgoer seriously injured, and the full account of what had happened to her emerged only afterwards, as investigators pieced together the sequence of the attack.
Recounting the terrifying moment, Ellerby said she had wanted to ask the man what he was doing, but stayed silent because she could see that he was also carrying a knife. She said that if she had spoken to him, he would probably have attacked her even more, a split-second calculation made as the violence was unfolding around her on the sidewalk.
Moore has now been charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of an elderly person, according to police. Officers said he is homeless and has a prior criminal history, details that have sharpened questions about how a vulnerable woman came to be attacked in the open as she waited for transport on a quiet morning.
Moore was arraigned on Tuesday night and is being held on 10,000 dollars cash bail or a 25,000 dollar bond, police said. The court appearance came within days of the Sunday morning assault, as prosecutors moved quickly to bring formal charges against the man accused of carrying out the attack on Ellerby near her home.
For Ellerby, the focus now turns to her recovery, and police say she is expected to pull through after the ordeal. The case, which unfolded in the space of a few moments as she waited for a cab to church on a Sunday morning, has ended with Moore in custody and facing multiple counts, while the elderly victim begins to heal from injuries inflicted by a man she had recognised from her own building.