Lululemon attack a rarity in retail, but a D.C. area woman has twice been a victim

The gunman shoved Mia Ramos into the restroom of a Blockbuster in McLean. If she did what he said, Ramos recalled the masked man telling her, he would be her “friend for the night.” Then he tied her hands behind her back, turned off the lights and locked her inside.

In the darkness on that night in November, Ramos’s mind began to race. It’s happening again, she thought. The gun. The robbery. The bathroom. She flashed back to a similar scene 15 years ago, when she was raped while working at a Foot Locker in Manhattan, just days before she was supposed to start her freshman year at New York University. She spent the next decade trying to put the attack behind her. Now, the memories rocked her again as she waited for the gunman to decide her fate.

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Victim Jayna Murray remembered: Family and friends gathered to remember Jayna Murray, who was allegedly killed by a co-worker in a Bethesda yoga-wear store.

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“Broken bones heal,” she said later. But emotional traumas, “they last for a lifetime.”

Ramos’s experience is highly unusual. Violent assaults in retail stores are so rare that the industry groups and academics who study business crime don’t track them. When these attacks do occur, such as the one in the Lululemon yoga-wear store this month, the crimes often grab headlines.

But as Ramos knows, the improbable can happen, sometimes more than once.

The first time Ramos was attacked, she got angry. It happened on a summer night in 1996, the day she moved into her dorm room at NYU. She was 18 and excited about being able to walk to her part-time job as a sales clerk at Foot Locker. She was scheduled for the last shift that day with three other workers. Five minutes after closing time, three men still lingered in the store.

She didn’t pay them much attention — just a couple of dawdling customers — until one of the men pulled out a gun. Worried about being seen through the store windows, they demanded the employees’ uniform shirts, and one of them eyed her as she took hers off. While the other robbers herded the rest of the employees and three other people who were in the store into a back office, he pointed to Ramos and ushered her into a bathroom.

She cried throughout the attack, thoughts of her family and the future that had seemed so close just that morning flickering in and out of her head. She begged him to stop but did not fight back. Her instincts told her that the more she struggled, the less likely she was to stay alive.

Her attacker, Norman Thompson, eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree charges of rape, sodomy and robbery. Ramos was determined to confront him at his sentencing, where the judge gave him 9¹ / ₂ to 19 years. “I may still be breathing,” she said in court, “but you stole away my life, because I’ll never be the person I once was.”

It took several years for Ramos to find that person again. There was a short-lived marriage, and a battle with depression that once sent her to the hospital. She relied on welfare, moved in with family and joined support groups. She spoke publicly about the rape and found that process to be therapeutic. After the second incident, she again decided to allow her name to be used publicly.