A woman who said she’d been held captive and raped in a Missouri home was wearing a dog collar and appeared to have been bound when she started banging on doors and pleading for help last week, neighbors said Monday.
Ciara Tharp and Lisa Johnson spoke to NBC affiliate KSHB of Kansas City three days after Timothy Haslett Jr. was taken into custody on charges of rape, kidnapping and assault in Excelsior Springs, 28 miles northeast of Missouri’s most populous city, the Clay County Sheriff’s office said in a statement.
The woman reported the allegations to authorities at 7:47 a.m. Friday, the sheriff’s office said.
Minutes before, Johnson saw the woman hunched over and appearing to crawl up her front steps, asking for help, the station reported. Johnson noticed the dog collar — it looked like a homemade shock collar — and ligature marks around her wrists and ankles, according to the station.
When Johnson grabbed the phone to call 911, the woman ran away, saying the man who’d held her captive would kill them both, according to the station.
Tharp said her grandmother, who lives next door, heard a woman knocking on the door, saying: “‘You have to help me, I’ve been raped. I’ve been held captive,” KSHB reported.
The woman appeared thin, weak and barely clothed, with ligature marks, a metal dog collar and what appeared to be duct tape hanging from her neck, as if it had been pulled down from her mouth, Tharp told the station.
Tharp’s grandmother took her in and provided food, water and a blanket, the station reported. The woman told the grandmother that she’d been held in the basement since last month and that she escaped after her captor left the house Friday morning, KSHB reported.
The sheriff’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Haslett has a lawyer to speak on his behalf.
Haslett was taken into custody after authorities searched his home and the Kansas City police crime scene investigators processed the scene, the sheriff’s office said.
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