A Terrace man was attacked with a machete while biking across the Dudley Little Bridge near Walmart last month.
Darren Andreasen, 47, was biking home with two other bicycles tied to a mobile trailer in the evening of May 11 when he says a man riding a bike came up behind him “out of nowhere” and accused him of stealing the bikes.
“There was no one there, and all of a sudden, poof! He’s right behind me,” Andreasen says. “He was screaming and yelling at me that one of the bikes on my trailer was his friend’s.”
He says he told the man he got the bikes from a friend and was headed down to drop them off for a coworker who wanted to fix them up, as they were in need of repair.
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“He kept on insisting, and he pulled out a machete,” Andreasen says.
The man then allegedly swung the weapon, cutting the top muscle of Andreasen’s knee, and then hit his leg and thigh with the back of the blade. Andreasen says he fell in the middle of the road. Three cars drove around him without stopping.
At that point, the attacker was gone.
“I was screaming, ‘Call the cops!’ because people were just driving past me,” he says.
Fortunately, the fourth driver did stop and helped Andreasen into his truck, tied up his wound with a shirt and put his three bikes in the back of the pickup.
He then gave Andreasen a ride to Mills Memorial Hospital, where he received 11 stitches on his injured knee.
“It’s still swollen and it hurts,” he said two weeks after the incident. In total, Andreasen says he’s missed 44 hours worth of wages because of his injury. That’s significant, he says, considering most of his paycheck goes toward rent.
“And then this happens… I couldn’t even afford antibiotics or painkillers. I was broke because I had just paid everything off.”
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North District RCMP says the Terrace detachment have identified a suspect, but because the investigation is before the courts no further information is available.
Andreasen suspects the man may have been staying at the homeless campsite near Walmart because of how suddenly he appeared, but can’t remember what the man looked like.
“My legs are my life, and the thing that bugs me the most is he took away the one thing I love doing — walking. For 10 days I couldn’t do anything,” he says.
“I never used to be worried about walking around town. You know, this is Terrace. I never dreamed I’d be attacked by a machete — a machete, of all things.”
There was a similar machete-related incident in Terrace three years ago. In 2016, two men were charged in an alleged machete attack on Loen Ave. that left a man with serious injuries.
If you have information about crime contact the Terrace RCMP at (250)638-7400 or anonymously through Crime Stoppers by telephone at 1-800-222-TIPS, online at www.terracecrimestoppers.ca.
brittany@terracestandard.com
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