Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson were the two Swedish Ph.D. students who discovered Brock Turner raping a woman on Stanford’s Palo Alto campus in 2015. Arndt and Johnsson’s intervention led to Turner’s arrest and their testimony to his conviction.
The two are now able to speak to some degree about their experience, and in an interview with Swedish news site Expressen, translated by BuzzFeed, they describe finding Turner and his victim on their bike ride home:
“We saw that she was not moving, while he was moving a lot… So we stopped and thought, ‘This is very strange.”
“When he got up we saw that she still wasn’t moving at all, so we walked up and asked something like, ‘What are you doing?’”
Turner suddenly jumped up and attempted to run away before being tackled by Jonsson. Arndt checked on the victim, saying, “She lay perfectly still.”
According to her now famous letter about her experience, the victim had not met the men who stopped to help her as of last Thursday. She wrote of them:
Thank you to the two men who saved me, who I have yet to meet. I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed to remind myself there are heroes in this story. That we are looking out for one another. To have known all of these people, to have felt their protection and love, is something I will never forget.
According to BuzzFeed, Jonsson shared her letter on his own Facebook page:
Jonsson posted the victim’s letter on his Facebook page Tuesday, thanking friends and strangers for all the “encouragement and support” over the past few months. He said he would not publicly comment on the process or outcome of the trial, but asked everyone to read her letter.
“To me it is unique in its form” he wrote, “and comes as close as you can possibly get to putting words on an experience that words cannot describe.”
Sometimes heroes are just people who stop instead of riding by.
Image via flickr.
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