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Feb 14, 2008 6:44 pm US/Central
Elderly Dallas Woman Beaten, Gagged & Robbed
DALLAS (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
An elderly woman was injured and lost her life savings when someone broke into her home overnight. The attack and robbery happened in the 8500 block of Lazy Acres Circle.
Domitila Cruz was attacked in her North Dallas townhouse. She says the thugs added injury to insult, because they beat her in the face. "I was praying to the saints. I put my life in their hands," Cruz told CBS 11 News.
Cruz says she was sleeping on the couch and waiting for her companion of nearly 40 years, Gavino Hoyos, to come home from work. Instead the 76-year-old woman says she woke from her sleep to find two men were suddenly on her.
The woman says she was hit in the back and the face. "One held me down, and when I tried to scream they hit me." Pointing to a scar on her upper lip Cruz said, "This is what they left on my face from slapping me."
Cruz says the men hit her so hard they knocked her dentures out, then bound her with a phone cord and roughly gagged her with a rag over her mouth and nose.
The woman says she squirmed to keep from suffocating. "I pulled out my neck and tucked in my chin, so that when they quit I could still breathe."
One man held Cruz downstairs while the other ransacked upstairs bedrooms, eventually finding the couple's money hidden in a bag. According to a police report $12,000 was stolen, but Cruz says it was $18,000. It was money she says she and Hoyos had been saving since 1985.
"[I] can't work. I scavenge dumpsters for things. They [the robbers] just want to grab what they didn't earn," she said.
Cruz told CBS 11 News that she lay bound and gagged on the floor of her home for nearly three hours. So far police have made no arrests in the case.
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