On the recordApril 27, 2010
As my friend has pointed out, this resolution, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the statistics really don't tell the story because it is a story about people. Real people. She mentioned one from her State of Wisconsin. And there are too many to mention and talk about. But I would like to talk about one person that impacted my life. Before I came to Congress, I spent all of my time at the courthouse in Houston, first as a prosecutor and then as a criminal court judge. Every day for years, almost 30, I saw criminal cases, either prosecuting them or hearing them as a judge. One of those cases involved a young lady. I will call her Lisa. Lisa was a student at the University of Houston. She was married and had a couple of sons. She worked in the daytime and went to school at night to get a second degree. She had left school one evening and she was driving down one of our freeways heading home out in the suburbs. The lights came on on the dash of her car, she had car trouble, and she pulled off to a service station she thought was open. It was not open, but she thought it was. Lisa talked to the service station attendant, turned out he wasn't the service station attendant but she thought he was, trying to get some help late at night. The first thing that happened, Luke Johnson pulled her out of that car. He kidnapped her. He took her to a remote area of east Texas in the piney woods. He sexually assaulted her.
