Man arrested for 1991 mugging assault of teen girl

After 25 years, a Toronto woman says justice has been served after the man who mugged and attacked her as teen was arrested at the American-Canadian border.

On November 24, 1991, a 15-year-old Eden Hertzog was walking home after midnight from Bathurst station when she was attacked from behind and robbed.

“All of a sudden I just felt like a blow to the side of my face, and the next moment I was down on the ground,” she recalls.

Decades later, Hertzog says the impact of those vicious blows has not faded. The mother of two says there is a crack in her fractured jaw that will never fully heal.

“It never really set properly back in place, so it freezes sometimes, or it clicks,” she says. “It’s just not quite in place.”

She was forced to undergo surgery for an injured kneecap in her late twenties. When she gave birth to her first child, a head jolt from one of her contractions triggered shock and a need for neck and jaw re-alignment.

The man who attacked her, then 18-year-old Corey Maclin, was quickly tracked down by police moments after the incident, thanks to a description from Hertzog. Even today, she says she vividly remembers struggling with the man in a Dolphin’s jersey for her purse, and watching him run off with it when the strap broke.

But when it came time for the trial date, Maclin didn’t show up, instead fleeing to his hometown of Buffalo, New York.

Hertzog says she gave up any hope that her attacker would ever be found.  But then, she got a call this week that would change everything.

“She said, ‘Well you won’t believe this, but 25 years later this man tried to cross the border and the border patrol stopped him and he’s being held in custody.”

Corey Maclin pleaded guilty and spent six days behind bars, forced to pay a $300 dollar fine. The accused and his lawyer declined to speak to media.

Toronto lawyer Kim Schofield says the short sentence is not a surprise because of how long ago the assault occurred.

“He comes back 25 years later, [it’s] very unlikely the crown could prove the case like that.”

She says it’s not uncommon for the crown and defence to come to an agreement, since trying the case so many years later would prove difficult.

Hertzog says she is satisfied by the outcome and the opportunity to address her attacker face-to-face. She read a victim impact statement, and received an apology from Maclin in court.

“There was some justice in it. Not so much that he was in jail or anything, but that I had an opportunity to just have closure on it.”

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Read Eden Hertzog’s full impact statement below: 

“It is a peculiar thing to write this, twenty-four years after an incident which I assumed I would never hear about again.

What is more strange to me is writing this to you, a total stranger. A stranger who has had incredible impact on my life.

I was fifteen years old when you ran up behind me on a dark, quiet street on a November night, and struck the side of my face so hard that I fell onto my knees on the sidewalk. I was terrified; I had not heard you coming. You were then standing over me pulling at my purse, which tore quickly, and then off you ran with it. I yelled out, and was able to see what you were wearing before you disappeared down the alley. My purse had forty dollars in it, and a few tapes and some lip gloss.

After the incident, my jaw was frozen and swollen for days. I was in a state of shock and fear for a long time, and I found no real way to process it. I was young and scared, and had never been physically hurt by anyone before.

It has been many years since this incident. I no longer feel or anger or rage. I don’t feel resentful or vengeful – but I do feel it is important to make you aware of how your one senseless action affected me and my life.

When you hit me, you fractured my jaw. There is a small crack in it that will never fully heal, and it causes issues for me still. When I fell on the ground, I damaged my left kneecap, which created a series of issues for me, leading to a knee surgery when I was twenty-seven.

When I gave birth to my first child at age thirty-three, I threw my head back during a contraction and it triggered the shock and trauma from the assault, resulting in a year of chiropractic and cranio sacral work to re-align my neck and jaw, and also to sort through the post-traumatic stress that was in my body, even all those years later.

I do not walk in alleyways by myself at night anymore, and even though I am strong, able, and fierce, I will forever be aware of potential danger. I will teach my son and daughter to protect themselves from these dangers as well, but never to feel that the world is an unsafe place. We all have the basic human right to feel safe on this earth.

I don’t know you, or your life, or what put you in a position to violate my body and steal from me. What I truly hope is that you have not done this to anyone else, and if you have, that you will never do it again. I hope you learned from this incident, and that you have truly forgiven yourself and accepted full responsibility for your actions. I hope you are a respectful citizen who is part of the solution, not the problem. And if you cannot truthfully say that you have been, that you find the resources and the inner resolve to do so.”