Jacob Tillman remembers exactly where he was when he learned that his younger sister, Lydia, had been brought to the hospital in Denver, Colorado, after being raped, beaten, and doused with bleach in her apartment, which her attacker set on fire on July 4, 2011. Lydia narrowly escaped death by leaping from the second story window. Jacob, 36, an artist and skateboard salesman, was on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. As luck would have it, he had just made it to the western side of the Rocky Mountains and was able to get to the hospital an hour or two after Lydia, then 31, arrived with her ankle, ribs, and eye sockets broken, her chin shattered, and untold damage to her brain and internal organs.

“You don’t ever really think that anything like that could happen,” Jacob told Fast Company recently at a café in Manhattan. “It was so weird, so surreal and like a hyper-awareness, a major adrenaline rush. I was constantly trying to put together what happened. My mind was going a thousand miles an hour.”

Jacob found Lydia in a medically induced coma, still strapped to temporary EMS equipment because her vitals were so delicate any change might spike her blood pressure and endanger her more.

As Lydia lay in her coma, at least one family member was present at all times, even as she struggled and sent nurses and doctors running into the room. “The visual side of all of this was gnarly,” Jacob said. “She was so badly beaten. She was covered in blood the whole time. There was blood matted in her hair, blood in her ears. She was so sensitive. She was in the exact condition that they found her in in the backyard of her house… It was so bad that after the third day, when her eyelashes started to peek out, we celebrated.”





Flowers weren’t even allowed in the room since her condition was so unstable, so Jacob passed the days drawing bouquets for her and writing her notes for when she finally woke up. He and his two other siblings, Esther and Steven, and their parents, refused to wallow. “Feeling sorry for ourselves or getting angry or anything like that stuff would be a counterproductive use of energy. It just wouldn’t happen. Nothing in that situation would happen that’s counterproductive. It was just so obvious what sort of things were appropriate.”

Cut to a year later. Lydia fought her way back from the assault, recovered most of her speech and physical functions through intensive therapy, and helped convict Travis Forbes, the guy who did it–and who, just months before attacking Lydia, murdered Colorado teenager Kenia Mogne. His use of bleach to try and (unsuccessfully in Lydia’s case) destroy physical evidence was the detail that lead police to link Lydia’s attack to Mogne’s murder.





Forbes was sentenced to life in prison for the first degree murder of Mogne. Later he got 48 more years for the attack on Lydia. The judge in the case read aloud a note written by Lydia during her recovery wishing peace on her attacker (“My spirit and my soul, in my mind, remains untouched … I wish you peace in this life,” she wrote). The case was so sensational it was chronicled by Dateline NBC and other national TV outlets.