GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – With help from strangers, a Green Bay woman is recovering after being stabbed several times in the neck and face on Sunday afternoon.
Prosecutors say 25-year-old Pedro Hernandez stabbed and slashed his girlfriend with a box cutter, as she was driving with the couple’s two young children in the back seat.
Jacob Peters, a Green Bay man that helped the victim before emergency crews arrived, spoke to FOX 11.
“The first thing she said when I got out there was that her boyfriend had killed her.”
As Peters ran to help after hearing screaming outside his home, Cory and Kelly Thomas were pulling their car over when seeing the woman holding her bleeding neck at the corner of West Mason Street and 15th Avenue..
“The way she was losing blood, she only had minutes,” said Cory Thomas.
While Cory used napkins and a shirt to try to stop the bleeding, Kelly tended to the victim’s infant son and toddler-aged daughter.
“There were a couple of times where she had asked my daddy did this to my mommy? And I said I don’t know honey,” said Kelly Thomas.
Hernandez is the father of the two young children, according to a criminal complaint.
The woman told investigators the couple was driving to Festival Foods when Hernandez asked her if she wanted to see something.
When the woman said sure, “Pedro pulled out the silver box cutter type weapon and began to stab and cut her in the neck and face area.”
“I’ve seen the photographs, the injury looks serious to the neck area,” said Dana Johnson, a prosecutor for the Brown County Sheriff’s Department. “Obviously, any kind of injury to the neck is serious.”
According to the criminal complaint, the woman told investigators “Pedro has been acting strangely lately, and has been thinking the Mexican Mafia is out to kill him.”
The woman also said Hernandez believed she wanted to kill him.
“All she kept saying is my kids, my kids. I had to comfort her about that and say they’re alright, my wife’s with them, and grandma is coming, and you’re going to be ok and thankfully she is alright.” said Thomas.
Cory and Kelly Thomas and Peters say they’ve been in contact with the victim and her family. They say she’s had two surgeries and is expected to survive.
The Green Bay Police Department says Hernandez ran from the scene and from police officers shortly after the incident happened.
Hernandez was taken into custody a few blocks from the scene, on 13th Avenue.
A $250,000 cash bond was set in court Monday. A competency hearing was scheduled for October 8th.
