A joyous outing for a developmentally disabled woman who loved horses turned to a nightmare when she was sexually assaulted at Aqueduct Racetrack, her anguished mother told the Daily News.
The 80-year-old mother said her daughter, at age 40, looks at the Aqueduct racehorses with the wonder of a 2-year-old.
“I said to her, ‘Do you want to go see the horses?’ ” the mother recalled Tuesday from their home in Sunnyside, Queens.
“She likes them a lot, we’ve been to the racetrack many times, so she said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ “
During their visit to the South Ozone Park, Queens, track on Super Bowl Sunday, they had been watching the races on the third floor of the track.
“I’m going to bet one,” the mom said she told her daughter, and she turned away briefly to place her bet. When she turned back, her daughter was gone.
Fear filled her in an instant.
“I started looking around, but I didn’t see her,” the mother said. “I said to the guard, ‘My daughter disappeared.’ I was scared something happened to her.”
They found a female guard, and the trio scoured the track. More guards joined the search. They searched bathrooms, they went to the track’s other floors.
Then a guard told her that her daughter had been found, the mother told The News.
“She’s fine,” she remembered the guard saying.
They didn’t tell her her daughter was naked and screaming, huddled in a bathroom stall when she was rescued by a stranger who saw the alleged perpetrator leaving hurriedly, pulling up his pants as he fled.
The unidentified woman who found the victim told police she heard the attacker warn “Don’t tell anybody” before he scurried from the bathroom.
Frank Wood, 37, of Pennsylvania, was taken into custody and charged with sexual assault, a felony punishable by seven years in prison.
In the family’s apartment, with its wooden coatrack carved in the shape of horses and small tapestry of white and brown horses hanging near the entryway, the mother choked back tears Tuesday night when she thought of what might have happened to her daughter.
“We found her, he didn’t kill her,” she said. “They always find people like her dead.”
“If something happened to her I’d die,” she said.
The mother said the broken-down palace of what was once called “The Sport of Kings” is not the place it once was.
“The men at the tracks now, they’re bums,” she said. “They curse, they steal. It was never like that before.”
