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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah woman held hostage and brutally beaten by her neighbor last April said Wednesday she is suing police, claiming the attack happened after officers mishandled her reports of harassment for nearly a year.
Savannah Fuchs filed a lawsuit against the city of North Ogden and three police officers, saying they negligently failed to disclose Todd Alan Barber's criminal history or arrest him before the attack that left her with a brain injury and dozens of stitches. She is seeking unspecified damages.
North Ogden Mayor Brent Taylor disputed her account, calling the beating tragic but unforeseeable and saying the city should not be held responsible.
Court documents say Barber held the 31-year-old woman hostage at gunpoint for two hours on April 1, shooting at her and pistol-whipping her on the head and face.
"And there he was with a gun, bags and duct tape, and he had zip ties and he came in to rape me and kill me and my son," said Fuchs, according to the Deseret News. "And I survived."
The attack ended after Barber called police and killed himself when they arrived.
Fuchs and her 6-year-old son moved into a town house in October 2012 that shared a wall with 54-year-old Barber. Though he initially seemed nice, within months she started coming home to toys, gifts and an Easter card about Jesus being risen, according to the lawsuit.
Fuchs is Jewish, and Barber later started leaving Biblical messages on her front porch, and once she found a Christian fish scratched onto her car, according to the suit. He would also knock on her door for long periods and look into her windows at odd hours, she said.
Fuchs says she called police seven times to report harassment, and she believed officers who told her they'd talked to Barber and everything would be all right.
But her attorney, Robert Sykes, says that Barber had a violent criminal history.
"They should not have reassured her that she was safe. That reassurance was negligent. It was improper, especially if they hadn't done their homework to find out how much of a risk he was," Sykes said. The April 1 attack came after she complained to her landlady, who told Barber to move.
Taylor disagreed, saying he's reviewed the case and that police did everything they could to protect her.
"We are not going to take money from the wallets of hard-working North Ogden taxpayers for what ultimately amounts to a terrible, but unpredictable, crime committed by an evil person acting on his own," Taylor told the Salt Lake Tribune.
He said Fuchs called police only three times, and declined officers' suggestion to get a protective order.
Fuchs said a protective order wouldn't have helped, because Barber lived so close by.
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