A CNN producer is scared to walk around D.C. after someone jumped him last week on his walk to work and severely beat him before robbing him.
“It still hurts a lot,” Aaron Cooper said. “This whole top part of my jaw broke off. I mean, it was loose. It was separate. And they had to use four metal plates to stick it back together.”
Even in broad daylight with plenty of people around and a News4 camera on him, the 33-year-old said he was nervous about walking on First Street NE Monday.
Cooper was called to work at 4 a.m. Thursday. He walked through a tunnel under the railroad tracks toward the CNN building, just a couple of blocks from where he lives.
“I can remember looking under the bridge, and there wasn’t anybody out here,” he said.
He was knocked unconscious during the attack.
“I remember walking across the street and then I remember waking up right here in a pool of blood,” he said.
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Cooper lost his cell phone, his computer and his wallet. Minutes after the attack, someone used his credit card at Ninth and H streets in Northeast, about 12 blocks away from the scene of the attack.
More importantly, Cooper lost his sense of safety.
“Even though this is two blocks, I’m going to drive to work,” Cooper said. “I’m going to park in the basement of that apartment building and I’m going to park in the basement of CNN, because it just spooks me.”
