Passenger In Truck Involved In Border Crossing Crash Says People Were Trying To ‘Kill Them’
May 15, 2019, 6:19 PM | Updated: 6:22 pm
Summer Draper can’t get the moment out of her mind.
“I’m traumatized from it. I can’t sleep,” she said from her hospital bed.
She said she was a passenger in a pickup truck this past Monday with her friend, Frank Stricker, when they stopped to ask for directions in Tijuana, Mexico.
She still has a tough time making sense of what happened next.
Courtesy NBC / KGTV
“They attacked us,” she said. “If we would’ve stopped the car, we would’ve been dead. We had to run from those people. They were attacking us.”
Draper said she and Stricker, who is from Magna, were in Tijuana to do some shopping.
She doesn’t know why people started attacking them, but said Stricker took off to get away and headed towards the border.
That’s when Stricker crashed into at least a dozen other cars and street vendors at the San Ysidro crossing.
Draper said she remembers being shot at and their tires were slashed.
She also recalled that after the crash happened, they were still attacked.
“I knew that we would have died because a man came up and he just bashed my face with a rock,” she said.
According to Draper, she spent the night at a hospital before being returned to the U.S. for further treatment.
She’s now worried about Stricker, who is facing attempted homicide charges and is in the custody of Mexican authorities.
“Seriously, they did all of this without no medicine,” she said pointed to stitches in her still bloodied forehead. “I mean, I felt everything. And if that’s happening to me at a hospital, what’s happening to him in jail?”
There are still a lot of questions in this case.
Why were they attacked?
What happened?
Who attacked them at the border crossing?
That’s the part police in Tijuana are still working on.
Stricker has a long, criminal history in Utah including theft and not following the orders of law enforcement.
However, in this case, Draper says they are innocent.
“If you look at the video, we’re running from those people,” she said. “We were being attacked.”
