On Christmas day, a 22-year-old woman from Connecticut drank a little too much at a party and fell backwards into a mirror, hitting her head. She was knocked unconscious so fellow party-goers called an ambulance, but spending the day in the hospital isn't what turned her holiday into a nightmare. The woman says that while she was strapped down in the back of an ambulance, a paramedic sexually assaulted her.


According to the Hartford Courant, Mark D. Powell has admitted to the crime, though it took him quite a time to come clean. The woman says that en route to Yale-New Haven Hospital, she felt a man "forcefully manipulating her breasts with his hands and pinched her nipples, causing pain." Then he put his hand down her pants and put his finger in her vagina. After she was out of the hospital, the woman started to piece together what had happened to her. She talked to friends and her mother, but was concerned about coming forward because she didn't have proof and she'd been drinking. The woman's mother says she told her, "I know it happened. I was drunk, but not drunk to the point where I'd lose my memory."

At first Powell denied anything had happened, but eventually he admitted to the crime — after he'd tried to cook up plausible explanations for what he'd done. He said he pinched her nipple to "apply pain stimuli as he'd seen nurses do in the hospital." Her vagina "became accidentally exposed," and we can't really expect medical professionals to not sexually assault patients when their private areas are visible. Powell later told police that "he inserted his right middle finger into the female's vagina up to the first knuckle," and at one point said "I just diddled it."


Powell was charged with sexual assault and unlawful restraint, and is already out on bail. He says he "made a mistake and a serious lapse in judgment," and never did anything like this before — though hearing that this happened even once is sufficiently horrifying.

In Arrest Warrant, Paramedic Admits Hamden Sexual Assault [Hartford Courtant]