After she warned others of a man fondling himself, he laughed and fractured her face, she says

As she was leaving the grocery store with dinner for her three kids Monday night, a man pulled up to her in his car, asking for directions.

But when 35-year-old Amanda Edwards looked into his vehicle, she says that she could see him fondling himself. Edwards told the man to get lost, she wrote on Facebook Wednesday.

Then the man fondling himself just drove on to another young woman in the Federal Way, Wash., Safeway grocery store parking lot, Edwards told Q13.

To warn them what he was up to, Edwards says she called out to the other woman, who Edwards said was with an 8- or 9-year-old girl. Edwards tried to get a picture of the man’s vehicle, she wrote on Facebook, but the man quickly sped off.

That wasn’t the last she’d see of him, though, Edwards wrote on Facebook.

On her walk home, Edwards says the same man pulled up near her, got out of his white four-door sedan and attacked her — leaving her face fractured in four places and badly bruised, and the roof of her mouth cracked, she wrote on Facebook.

“He put time into following me and getting out of his car and running up on me and attacking me,” Edwards told Q13. “I feel like if he got away with it, he would probably feel like he can do it again.”

Police in Federal Way told the New York Daily News that they’re investigating the incident, including interviewing Edwards about what she says happened Monday night.

Authorities are also checking to see if there’s any surveillance footage that captured any of the events involved in the alleged attack, the Daily News reports.

As of 2012, women in the U.S. were twice as likely as men to say that there was a part of their neighborhood where they’re fearful to walk at night, according to the Washington Post. That’s about 45 percent of women, which is an improvement since the 1970s, when more than 60 percent of women said they were wary to step out at night. But only 20 percent of men report the same fear, and that number has been relatively steady, the Post reports.

Meanwhile, slightly more than half of American women have been victims of physical abuse, according to U.S. Department of Justice numbers from the early 2000s — whether that’s in their own homes, or from a stranger on the street, as Edwards says she experienced.

“He was extremely aggressive and when he came up and he said, ‘I got you,’ ” Edwards told Q13. “When he started laughing, it was one of the most evil laughs I’ve heard.”

Edwards described the suspect to police as a slim Pacific Islander man in his 20s or 30s.

She said that she thinks he followed her and attacked her because she tried to warn others about him.

“Thankfully I was not killed or raped,” Edwards wrote on Facebook. “But let’s not give this guy the opportunity to try this again to someone else.”

The Federal Way Police Department did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Edwards described the man’s car on Facebook as a white four-door sedan with substantial damage to the passenger side.

This story was originally published November 17, 2017 at 3:01 PM with the headline "After she warned others of a man fondling himself, he laughed and fractured her face, she says."