INDIANAPOLIS — Another woman is coming forward, saying she was the victim of a serial assault suspect.
Seven different victims have been assaulted in four different attacks and police say the same man is responsible for all of them.
“I remember those eyes and I just remember what he looked like,” Sheri Osner recalled of the man she said tried to attack her last week downtown in broad daylight.
Then, when Osner saw a picture of the man police say stabbed a jogger on the cultural trail last Thursday, she recognized the suspect immediately.
“That face doesn’t just go away,” Osner said.
That’s the face, the 39-year-old said also belonged to the man who came up to her last Thursday morning at a bus stop on Delaware Street downtown just before noon.
“He’s like, ‘Don’t you remember?’” Osner says the man asked her. “I’m like, ‘No.' He’s like, ‘Come here. Give me a hug.' I was like, ‘No. I don’t remember you. I’m not going to give you a hug.'"
Osner said the man then pulled out a knife.
“He’s like, ‘If you don’t come with me, I’m gonna stab you,’” she said he told her. “And I said, ‘No. I’m not coming with you.'"
“I started to walk away and then I was like, ‘OK. I’m gonna sprint,’” Osner remembered thinking. “And I started to run and he ran after me right away."
A moment after she started to run, Osner said she tripped on her sandals and fell into the street. She remembers a car stopping briefly and looking up and seeing the man with the knife standing over her.
“I saw my life, I thought that was it, like I was done,” Osner said she remembers thinking.
Then, according to Osner, for a moment, the man seemed to switch gears.
“He acted like he was helping me, so he started giving me my phone and I’m like, ‘You can have everything,’” Osner said she remembers saying before getting up and running into a nearby shoe store, telling employees inside to lock the door and call police.
“I was freaking out. I was so scared and my hand was bleeding. I was just freaking out,” Osner said of those initial moments inside the store.
Osner said store employees called police, while others inside the store, continued to look outside, telling her, the man was still there at the bus stop.
When officers go there, though, he was gone.
Eyewitness News obtained a copy of the police report Osner filed.
It lists “Intimidation with a knife for refusal to give a hug.”
A week later, Osner said she saw a news report about a woman stabbed on the Cultural Trail and recognized the suspect in the attack as the same person who tried to attack her.
“When I saw that face in the mugshot, in the picture, I knew that was him,” Osner said.
According to court documents, as it stands right now, investigators have charged Victor Alvin Johnson in four attacks on seven women in just two days, last Wednesday and Thursday, all of them in broad daylight.
In at least one of those other attacks, court documents allege, Johnson asked for a hug before pulling out a knife.
“I’m just so happy he got caught and I pray he’ll be behind bars for the rest of his life,” said Osner.