Family wants public to see injuries to woman attacked on Silver Comet

Kristen Waddell walked to the place on the Silver Comet Trail where her sister-in-law was attacked two days earlier and just seeing the crime scene took her breath away.

“It’s atrocious to think he could get her off the trail,” Kristen Waddell said of Tina Waddell’s attacker. “I see the crime scene tape. Oh my God.”

Just being there made her feel helpless and numb, she said Thursday afternoon.

Tina Waddell, who teaches 2-year-olds attending a nearby YMCA, was attacked Tuesday evening near the 19 1/2 mile marker on a segment of the popular trail that passes through Paulding County. It’s a walk she took several times a week. On Tuesday she passed up a trip to the gym with her husband because the weather was so perfect, Jim Waddell said.

Around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, a bike rider came up on the 42-year-old Tina Waddell, crawling up an embankment from the brush and the trees that line the trail. She was able to say she was attacked but little else.

While she recovers in a Cobb County hospital, her husband and his family have started a campaign of defiance by putting out a startling photo of Tina’s head and facial injuries so people can understand how badly she was hurt.

“I want people to realize it was not just a slight attack,” Kristen Waddell said. “We’re just hoping somebody saw something or somebody came home with injuries they can’t explain. I hope he broke his hand hitting her and he has to go to the doctor.”

Jim Waddell said every bone in his wife’s face was broken and doctors will have to wire her jaw shut for six to eight weeks. The only other injuries were scratches on her back that may have been caused when the attacker dragged her off the trial and into the trees, he said. Jim Waddell said she was not sexually assaulted.

Even after what happened to Tina Waddell, her family members are insisting that people should not stay away from the 61.5-mile Silver Comet, which begins in Polk County and runs south through Cobb and west in Paulding counties to the Alabama line where it joins the 33-mile-long Chief Ladiga Trail.

The Paulding County Sheriff's Office said Tina Waddell's attack was one of only two serious crimes that have occurred in the county on the trail, that began opening in 1999. Eight years ago Jennifer Ewing, taking her regular 50-mile ride, was raped and murdered. Michael Ledford was convicted of killing Ewing on July 25, 2006,and is now on Georgia's death row.

Cobb County police said there had been only one report of an assault, on a middle-age man on a bike who suffered minor injuries at the hands of several teenagers.

It bothered Kristen Waddell that there seemed to be so few people on the trail Thursday. While she only saw one person on a bike, a deputy in one of the sheriff’s office’s two Smartcars passed her twice as part of his routine patrol.

The family has opened an account at Sun Trust Bank to raise money for a reward; the name on the account is Take Back the Trail for Tina. And they also are organizing a walk along the segment where she was attacked for 10 a.m. Saturday, starting at Tara Drummond Park and ending near Tina Waddell’s apartment complex.

Jim Waddell said his wife was much better Thursday, when she was moved out of the intensive care unit. Some of the swelling has gone down and she can open her eyes a little.

“It’s going to be a long road to recovery,” he said of his wife who moved to Georgia from Arkansas in 2010 to marry him.

She has no memory of the assault except her attacker came at her from the front, he said.

Before he walked into his wife’s hospital room for the first time Tuesday, doctors prepared Jim Waddell for the shock of the brutality of his wife’s injuries.