BIG CREEK, W.Va. (AP) – For at least a week, authorities say, a young Black woman was held captive in a mobile home, forced to eat animal waste, stabbed, choked and repeatedly sexually abused – all while being peppered with a racial slur.
It wasn’t until deputies acting on an anonymous tip drove to a ramshackle trailer deep in West Virginia’s rural hills that she was found. Limping toward the door with her arms outstretched, she uttered, “Help me,” the Logan County sheriff’s office said.
Six people, all white, including a mother and son and a mother and daughter, have been arrested and could face federal hate crime charges in the suspected attack on 20-year-old Megan Williams, who remained hospitalized Tuesday with injuries that included four stab wounds in the leg, and black and blue eyes. Her right arm was in a cast.
“I’m better,” Williams told The Associated Press in a voice barely above a whisper.
The AP generally does not identify suspected victims of sexual assault, but Williams and her mother agreed to release her name.
The case is “something that would have come out of a horror movie,” Logan County Sheriff W.E. Hunter said.