Victim in brutal Pasadena attack speaks out after arrest of suspect

PASADENA, TX

We told you about the attack last month, when the woman was just making a simple trip to a gas station. Juanita Trevino says the strange man who brutally attacked her first grabbed her at a gas station and continued torturing her in a building across the street.

"I thought I was going to die," Trevino said.

An abandoned building on Queens Road had been haunting Trevino for weeks. It's where she says her alleged attacker, Dereck Esparza, forced her at knifepoint before beating, kicking and stabbing her repeatedly last month.

"I think that he knew that I was going to fight and that's when he started stabbing me in my head," Trevino said.

Trevino says the trouble started after Esparza approached her outside a Conoca gas station, saying he was homeless and needed help calling his mom.

Trevino says Esparza grabbed her from behind, put a knife to her neck and forced her across the street to this building.

"I was nice to him. He asked me for a cigarette and he asked me for my phone. I didn't deserve it," Trevino said.

Trevino says what happened inside the dark building was torture.

"When I came to, I just remember just trying to find my way out of the building. I no longer had my glasses, I was in a pitch dark building -- don't know where I'm at, don't know my way around the building," she said.

With stab wounds to the chest and head and a broken jaw, broken eye socket and sinus, Trevino was losing a lot of blood. But the grandmother and mother says she was determined to survive that day.

"I started crawling, and I crawled and I crawled until I finally hit a wall," she said.

That wall led Trevino to a door and eventually outside. The injured woman made her way back to the gas station and asked workers for help.

Right now, she says she's just glad her accused attacker's in jail.

"I'm glad, he doesn't need to be out in the street. If it wasn't me, it could have been somebody else," she said.

Trevino says she continues to have sleepless nights due to ongoing pain.

Esparza is due back in court later this month.
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