Woman attacked while jogging shares story of healing
After a jogger in Poland was attacked and sexually assaulted in 2018, she’s been on quite the healing journey. The first time we told her story, she wanted to remain anonymous.
Speaking out about it has been “incredibly difficult” for Rochele Saviers in the past, but now she wants other survivors to hear her story from a new perspective and know they aren’t alone.
Early in the morning on September 4th 2018, Saviers was out on a jog near Poland Township Park. What was usually an enjoyable activity, quickly turned into a nightmare when Saviers was attacked.
“I remember he walked right passed me in the park and then I’m feeling something very eerie and he turns back around and I start running away and he grabs me and then starts beating me up,” Saviers said.
She didn’t go down without a fight, but she was raped.
“He left me on the side of the road with no phone, he stole my phone,” Saviers said. “He just left me like a piece of trash basically,” she said.
The event was traumatic for Saviers but in the years to follow she’s found strength in her healing journey.
“It’s not all of a sudden I’m healed, I’m great and a lot of survivors I think get a little discouraged because they feel like they need to have this end story where they’re successful and things like that but it’s about the journey, it’s about the healing journey,” Saviers said.
A couple years later in 2020, Saviers set out to boldly share her story on social media platform TikTok, believing that talking about it was healthy. What she didn’t know is that she’d find community there.
“I joined a lot of other users on there who are also healing from sexual assault. You just want to be heard, you wanna feel heard and so when I use TikTok, I feel heard I feel seen and that’s another thing that survivors really need, they need to feel seen and heard,” Saviers said.
There were different phases she experienced in her healing journey but she didn’t have to go through them alone.
“Being able to share things going on with me as well as people commenting on my post and saying ‘Hey thanks for this post, this is what I’m feeling,’ it’s been great,” Saviers said. “So I feel less alone and I feel support through the community on there,” she said.
Now, she wants other survivors to experience that same comfort.
“I see you. The more you talk about what you’re going through rather than hide it, pretending it didn’t happen, the better you’re gonna heal, the faster you’re gonna heal,” Saviers said.
Saviers is still currently on her healing journey but she’s doing great.
She also wants people to be vigilant saying her attacker, Shawn Wendling, had been stalking her and watching her run in the park days before he attacked.
Wendling is currently sitting in jail on a 50 year sentence for raping several women.