Uechi-Ryu.com

It is the question asked by so many people trying to will the story of Amy Lord’s slaying to a different end: Why didn’t she run when she appeared to have the chance?

Beaten and terrorized, Lord was probably in such fear of her assailant that escape did not seem possible, specialists said Thursday.

A surveillance camera captured the 24-year-old stepping out of the passenger side of a sport utility vehicle, along a busy Boston road in the morning light Tuesday, cars passing nearby. Police say the image, released to the news media, was captured during Lord’s abduction, when she was forced to withdraw cash from five bank machines. Presumably, her attacker was in the driver’s seat.

It is impossible to know what was going through Lord’s mind at that moment or whether she had tried to get away earlier or would try later. Police have not said whether her abductor was armed. But a law enforcement official said that her attacker brutally beat her in her South Boston apartment that morning, and specialists who study the mind-set of victims and assailants said that trauma could help explain why she did not escape.


Lord may have made the same judgment many others have made in a moment of terror, believing that the safest option was to go along with her attacker’s demands, said Dr. Ronald Schouten, director of the law and psychiatry service at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“You want to believe — it’s survival mode — if I do what I’m told, this person won’t hurt me,” he said.

Perpetrators in cases such as this one often display an ability “to be calming and manipulative,” even if they are also violent, said Schouten, who coauthored the book “Almost a Psychopath.” They terrorize and cajole, convincing their victims that if they do as they are told, they will escape further harm, he said.

Specialists interviewed for this article were not involved in the investigation but spoke generally about patterns of victimization. Often in such crimes, they said, attackers know their victims and use threats against them or their loved ones as a means of control.

Police have given no indication that was the case with Lord. No one has been charged, but police have called Edwin J. Alemany a “person of interest.” The 28-year-old has been accused of attacking two other women in the same area Tuesday and Wednesday.

Dr. Harold Bursztajn, a psychiatrist and founder of the program in psychiatry and the law at Harvard Medical School, said that head trauma could have played a role in Lord’s case, if she had been badly beaten, leaving her confused or disoriented. People respond in a variety of ways to emotional trauma, he said.

“The usual acute traumatic stress disorder involves either fight, which some people do, flight, or if you’re badly enough injured, people freeze,” he said.

“She may have been, literally speaking, scared stiff.”

Often, victims are afraid of escalating the violence against them, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. He pointed to the murder of eight nursing students in Chicago in 1966 by just one man, Richard Speck. Speck tied the women up in their apartment, promising that all he wanted was money, and then killed them.

“People just oftentimes trust that he wants the money . . . that taking my life is not going to get him anything,” Fox said. “They reason. They believe that, logically, the best move is then not to get them angry.”

A loud crash brings your attention back to the present moment and in the adjacent checkout line you watch a small-framed man deliberately turn over a shopping cart and at the top of his lungs yell, “I ain’t paying that amount. It’s too much I tell you, too much.” People begin whispering and you feel the need to do something like take him to the ground, throw a roundhouse kick to his head or at least restrain him in a wrist lock, but you can’t.

Your body has turned to stone, there’s a slight trembling in your legs and your mouth has become dry as cotton. Thoughts flood your mind and the urge to run grows stronger, yet simultaneously you feel an overwhelming sensation to act. “What should I do? What should I do?” You wonder.

Recreational Martial Arts and Fight, Flight or Freeze

Trained and conditioned responses, sometimes take months even years to develop. Special Forces operatives usually undergo a year of extensive training before ever seeing combat. The same applies for law enforcement officers, firefighters, paramedics and even bouncers. Furthermore, time spent patrolling the streets, or on the battlefield, heightens their sense of awareness, which in turn allows them to experience the fight, flight or freeze syndrome in a calm and detached state, unlike the ordinary civilian.

And herein lies the problem with recreational martial arts practice and self-defense programs. Recreational martial artists are often led to believe they are learning how to fight, but sadly the dojo bears little resemblance to the mean streets of most metropolitan cities. And even in schools devoted exclusively to self-defense students may never experience the fight, flight or freeze syndrome because while physically practicing realistic techniques on a subconscious level, they feel safe because of the familiarity of their surroundings.

Worse yet are those who teach one-day seminars to unsuspecting persons all the while guaranteeing complete protection from any and all threats. This can and does happen frequently in large corporations, government agencies, and private companies when a well intentioned person desires to improve work safety, yet knows little about realistic self-protection.


Hence a martial arts instructor is paid to lead a self-defense seminar and the corporate staff comes away with a false sense of security and a handful of knowledge that may prove more dangerous than useful. For example, on several occasions I have personally witnessed self-defense instructors advocate striking the thorax as a first response in addition to the advice “just keep moving forward, you’ll work through the fight or flight as you go.”

How you react to danger on the street, battlefield or at home will begin first and foremost with the sign, signifier, fight, flight or freeze syndrome. The battle will be won or lost inside your mind and body long before the first shot, or punch, is fired or thrown. Past experiences, training and conditioning, mental alertness, physical conditioning, personal phobias, time and place will all determine your response.

More importantly though, there is no quick and easy answer for dealing with fight, flight or freeze. Either you condition yourself to work through it, or you don’t. It is always present because of our genetics and those who understand its effects have a far better chance of survival, than those who don’t.

This article is based on my latest book, Escaping Darkness.