A family vacation became a nightmare when a stranger kidnapped and raped their 80-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
While talking to CTV News, David Ahrens, the elderly woman’s son said the Canadian man seized the opportunity and dragged the woman into his hotel room at a Bahamas resort after she was separated from the rest of her family.
Ahrens said: “It’s just an unspeakable, horrendous, vile, violent angry crime against somebody who is so vulnerable.”
The horror started in January when Ahrens’ mother disappeared inside an elevator at the Warwick Hotel with the alleged perpetrator, who had invited himself to the family’s dinner earlier in the evening.
Ahrens’ sister tried to enter the lift to hold her mother, but the doors shut before she could grip her.
The family spent the next 30 minutes patrolling every floor of the hotel looking for the woman and pleading with hotel staff to check through security footage.
Eventually, they found their mother and the man where they left them, but under unfathomable circumstances.
Ahrens said: “Of course my mother was frightened and while we don’t need to go into a ton of detail, but what I will say, and it is horrendous, that she was holding her own underwear in her hand at that point in the elevator.”
The woman was rushed to a local hospital, where she tested positive for a rape kit.
Surveillance footage revealed the man pushing the woman, who was resisting, into a hotel room.
According to local reports, a 61-year-old Nova Scotia man has been charged with the rape of an 80-year-old woman at the location. He was denied bail and could face life in prison if convicted.
The devastated son said he wasn’t there when the incident occurred, but he took a flight to Bahamas as soon as his younger sister told him what happened.
The family embarked on the trip in a bid to make their mother have happy memories as she battles the heartbreaking disease.
Ahrens said: “Our concern is the combination of Alzheimer’s plus this incident of being sexually assaulted and rape, you know, that’s playing with her mind. So we’re just worried it’s playing in her subconscious and it’s just making things worse at the moment.
“She still deserves to create memories even if they don’t last for a long time. It’s also a memory for us.”
The petrifying incident occurred shortly after Canada and other countries issued travel advisories for citizens travelling to the Bahamas.
