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Monika’s Story
SMU Student Turns Rape Into Message of Survival
By SCOTT GOLDSTEIN, Dallas Morning News
As she prepared to phone her parents back home in Norway, the 20-year-old Southern Methodist University distance runner struggled with how she would tell them. Her father answered with a warm greeting. The young woman made sure her mother was there, too. They sensed something was very wrong.
“I’m doing OK, know that I’m fine,” she began. “Don’t freak out, but I got kidnapped and I got raped.”
A brief silence. Her mother shouted.
“No! No! No!”
But the young woman was soon comforting them. Hours after three strangers abducted her at random off an Old East Dallas street and brutalized her, there was resolve. There was a family vow that the horrors suffered by their youngest child in a foreign land would not break her, would not define her life.
With the last of her three rapists convicted last week in the December 2009 attack, that woman wants to “kill the silence” and troubling stigma surrounding sexual assault by putting a name on her story.
ESPN Outside The Lines Special: Breaking the Silence
She is 21-year-old Monika Kørra.
She is all of 5 feet 2 inches tall, with shiny blond hair and piercing blue eyes that reflect the focus and determination of a long-distance runner. She still faces dark moments, including vivid nightmares and anxieties. But anyone expecting her to break down will be waiting a long time.
Survivor advocates say the stigma surrounding rape remains strong, often slowing their recovery as they struggle with feelings of shame. They praise Kørra’s decision to speak openly about her case.
“When news picks up a story of somebody being courageous and coming out and talking about what happened to them, we see a significant uptick in our hotline traffic,” said Jennifer Wilson Marsh of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. “Seeing someone else talking about what happened to them lets them know that they’re not alone, that there’s help out there, that people will listen to them and believe them.”
“I made a promise to myself that I'm going to keep; that this will not change my life; this will not destroy me. I'm still alive, and I'm going to live my life like I did before, and I'm going to appreciate what I have.”
Norwegian Roots
Kørra’s track to Dallas began in the small town of Loten, Norway, about 90 minutes outside of Oslo. She competed in cross-country skiing and soccer in addition to running throughout childhood.
She draws strength from her mother, an only-child who lost her own mother to cancer when she was 8.
“She’s like me,” Kari-Ann Kørra said with a laugh. “She’s born with it.”
During her senior year in high school she caught the attention of Dave Wollman, SMU’s director of women’s track and field and cross country. Kørra had strong times in long-distance events and a passion for cross-country skiing.
Wollman said cross-country skiing indicates a high pain threshold. “Whenever someone has a cross-country skiing background, I feel really strong about recruiting them,” he said.
He persuaded her to come to Dallas sight unseen on a full scholarship.
In addition to the intense training regimen that usually includes two practices a day year-round and meets on most weekends, Kørra spent her first year studying psychology and trying to master the English language. She was so quiet that her teammates gave her an award for being the girl who never talks.
Though it was tough to be so far from home and she sometimes felt isolated, her social circle gradually expanded. By the end of her third semester, she had settled comfortably and was dating an SMU tennis player from Sweden.
“Every week I liked it more and more and more to stay here,” Kørra said.
That Night
On Dec. 5, 2009, Kørra was at a soccer team house party in Old East Dallas. She and two girlfriends left about 2:10 a.m. It was cold but the women were happy as they skipped the short distance to another friend’s car.
A black sport utility vehicle pulled up. The driver shouted.
What’s that? What did he say?
Kørra’s friend screamed. Two men grabbed Kørra from behind. She felt the cold barrel of a gun against her temple. She froze, like a doll, and was dragged helplessly from her best friend’s arms.
For the next hour and 19 minutes, Arturo Arevalo, Alfonso Armendariz Zuniga and Luis Fernando Zuniga took turns raping her as they laughed. On the floor she spotted women’s shoes.
I am not the first victim.
Each time one of the kidnappers pushed that cold gun against her head, she expected to hear a shot. But as they brutalized her, Kørra’s focus shifted.
Just fight, just fight. Don’t die. You’re not going to die.
Horrified friends and responding police called her cellphone repeatedly. Finally, one of the attackers told them where to find her near Fair Park. They’d pushed her out of the car onto the cold pavement, naked and barefoot, her dress in her hand and duct tape wrapped around her head and eyes.
“Run!” they told her. “Run!”
Dallas police Senior Cpl. James Shivers, in plain clothes, raced to the scene. Kørra was frantic. She initially didn’t believe he was an officer. Then she saw the light of a police helicopter. For the first time that night, she cried.
I’m going to be safe, I’m safe. I’m not going to die.
Holding it Together
Shivers recalled being struck by Kørra’s ability to keep herself together to help officers find the rapists. “She was composed for what I expected and trying to do her best,” he said.
An evidence photo from the hospital shows her wrapped in blankets, a piece of duct tape in her hair and a chilling emptiness in her eyes. She just wanted her friends, who were being interviewed by police.
The man who persuaded Kørra to move to Dallas woke up to several voice mails telling him she was kidnapped and then that she was found alive. He went to see her at her apartment after she was released from the hospital.
“Everybody in the place just cried,” said Wollman, who no longer leaves his cellphone off at night. “We were just so happy she was alive.”
Wollman offered to call Kørra’s parents, but she insisted that she do it.
Her mother’s first instinct was to race to Dallas, but her daughter told her not to come. She didn’t want them to see her college life that way. Even then their youngest child was in control.
“I can listen to your voice and I can hear that you will be OK,” Kari-Ann Kørra told her daughter.
For days, Kørra was enveloped with a fear that the rapists would come back for her. Their quick arrests helped ease her nerves.
She went to class but could not concentrate. She was beginning to fall ill because of the HIV prevention medication she was prescribed. But she ran, every day, as a form of therapy.
She also began to write about the attack in detail, the starting point for a book she says will be published in Norway next year.
“You have to deal with your emotions, you can’t just keep them inside,” Kørra said. “So I said I have to figure out some way that I get it out.”
She told her boyfriend, “I want to help others … I want to be strong, I want to heal.”
Lingering Effects
Back home in Norway for Christmas, Korra’s older sister slept in her bed every night. Some nights Korra would wake up screaming and, after sleepwalking, find herself in her parents’ room.
On long runs through the woods near her house, she lost herself in her thoughts, her tears, her screams. There was never a time that she considered dropping out of SMU. To do so would be to admit defeat.
In the months ahead in Dallas, Korra got back into a routine at school and athletics. Preparations began for the criminal trials. Former Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Erin Hendricks was assigned to the Arevalo case, the first to go to trial.
“My very first impression was she is just stunning and attractive and put together and polished and poised,” Hendricks said. “Nothing could shake her, nothing could rattle her.”
In the middle of their first meeting, Korra handed Hendricks what she had written about the attack.
“It was harder for me to hold myself together having read what she had written than it was for her to be in a room telling us what happened to her,” said Hendricks.
The judge handed Arevalo a life sentence in December, the same sentence that Alfonso Zuniga received from a jury last week. Korra testified in both trials. Luis Zuniga pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing.
Korra said the life sentence wasn’t the most important part of Alfonso Zuniga’s trial, it was the rapist’s response when she told him from the stand that she did not hate him. He thanked her.
“I think that’s the part that will always stick to my mind after this,” Korra said.
Dallas Detective B.J. Watkins, lead investigator in the case, was in the packed courtroom.
“I have never seen anybody as forgiving, as compassionate, as decent as a human being,” said Watkins, an officer for 30 years. “When you talk forgiveness and all, you just don’t see that.”
For Korra, there are lingering effects of the attack. Among them, she still has occasional nightmares, and she doesn’t like being alone when she’s out at night. She avoids violent movies.
With the trials behind her, Korra is focusing on using her forthcoming book, public speaking and possibly film as tools to reach out to other victims and change the perceptions of sexual assault.
The Arrests
Activity on Monika Korra’s stolen cellphone helped lead Dallas police to Luis Fernando Zuniga. Use of another cellphone stolen in a robbery shortly before Korra’s kidnapping helped lead police to Arturo Arevalo and Alfonso Armendariz Zuniga. All three men were arrested within days of the attack.
Arturo Arevalo, 29
Dubbed by Korra as “the worst one” in part because he forced her to sit on his lap, look him in the eyes and kiss his face. The convicted felon and admitted gang member had only been out of prison for a short time at the time of the kidnapping and rape. His criminal history includes a 2004 conviction in Laredo for theft of a human corpse.
The mother of his two children, Miriam Morales, testified last week that he was violent with her and their children. He is related to the other two rapists by marriage and was living in the same Far East Dallas apartment complex in the 2100 block of Highland Road as Alfonso Zuniga at the time of their arrest.
Arevalo was deported to Mexico days after he was arrested in a 2001 Dallas theft case. That deportation was part of a trend in which foreign defendants awaiting Dallas County trials were deported and set free in their native countries. His immigration attorney said he was born in the U.S. to American parents, but testimony in his rape trial indicated he has a Mexican birth certificate.
Arevalo was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to life in prison.
Alfonso Armendariz Zuniga, 29
Zuniga was the driver on the night of the attack, and Arevalo referred to him as the “boss.” He was living in the Far East Dallas apartment complex with his pregnant wife of 10 years, Cynthia Frias-Flores, and four young daughters at the time of his arrest. She later gave birth to a fifth daughter.
According to testimony, Zuniga did sheet rock work and has no prior felony convictions. The handgun used in the attack and a cellphone taken in a separate robbery shortly before the rape were found in Zuniga’s apartment. He is Luis Zuniga’s cousin.
He is a Mexican citizen, and Dallas County Jail records at the time of the arrest indicated he was suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
Zuniga was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to life in prison.
Luis Fernando Zuniga, 27
Dubbed the “nice” one by Korra because he seemed to have reservations about being involved in the attack, Luis Zuniga was the first of the three to be caught. Officers who arrested him for possession of suspected black tar heroin found Korra’s cellphone in his pocket.
He was living in the 7100 block of Red Bud Drive near North Jim Miller Road in southern Dallas with his girlfriend. It is unclear what, if anything, he did for work.
Zuniga pleaded guilty to charges in the rape case. He testified against Arevalo in December. He is a Mexican citizen, and Dallas County Jail records at the time of his arrest indicated he was suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
Under terms of a plea agreement, Zuniga was sentenced to a 25-year prison term.
