Atlanta police Thursday continued to look for the man who attempted to attack a woman on a popular northeast Atlanta jogging trail.
The incident happened shortly before 11 a.m. Monday on the Freedom Parkway Path near North and Euclid avenues.
The would-be victim, Emory University medical student Pearl Ryder, told investigators that she was jogging on the path when a man “jumped out of the wood line and started to run behind her very close,” according to an Atlanta police incident report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Ryder told police that she turned around and yelled at the suspect, “Hey! Hey!”
“That is when he grabbed at her and she put her arms up in a defensive stance and yelled louder, ‘What are you doing?,’ ” the incident report states. “The suspect then backed away and retreated back into the woods.”
Officers canvassed the area where the incident occurred, but were unable to find the suspect.
Joseph Strong said he and his wife use the path “at least once a day, sometimes twice a day.”
He said he heard about the attempted attack on Monday.
“As disturbed as we are about this, I don’t feel like it’s a recurring issue on the path,” Strong told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “But I would like to see police enforcement stepped up around here.”
Strong said that in the five years he and his wife have been using the trail, “we’ve had very few run-ins.”
The trail is a “frequent path for homeless people to come through, but by and large, we haven’t had any issues with them,” Strong said. “Most of them are gentle people, just down on their luck.”
Monday's incident came just days after two other attacks on metro Atlanta trails. Tina Waddell was savagely beaten while jogging on the Silver Comet Trail in Paulding County July 30. On August 5, a 19-year-old woman riding her bicycle on the Iron Hill Trail at Red Top Mountain State Park said a man tried to attack her with a Taser.
Ryder was not physically injured in the latest incident on the Freedom Parkway Path.
"It was scary," she told Channel 2 Action News. "It brought back a lot of fear, but I'm trying to conquer that."
— Staff photographer John Spink contributed to this report.
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