Three days and nine stitches later, a Ball State student still cannot believe he was stabbed on campus.
On Saturday night, Andrew Pizzano was walking alone in the Worthen Arena parking lot when a man in a hoodie approached him and told him to give him everything he had.
The suspect was described as a white man wearing a tan or brown sweatshirt, according to a university email.
Pizzano threw his wallet and phone at his offender, and when the man saw he only had a dollar, the offender attacked.
“He lunged at me, and I stepped forward to wrestle, and we were pushing each other, [I was] trying to get away,” he said.
The attacker hit him in his left arm, looked at the arm, then dropped Pizzano’s things and ran.
Pizzano just felt pain and didn’t know it was a stab wound until he lifted up his sleeve and saw blood.
“So I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I think I just got stabbed,’” he said.
He immediately called his mom and then Betsy Stein, his friend and his resident assistant. His call log said it was 11:30 p.m. when he made the calls.
“I turned my arm to look at it, and when I did, it popped open and blood started really coming out of it,” he said. “So my friend took me to the hospital.”
Stein drove him to IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital, where he was checked in at midnight.
University Police Department officers were already there for another situation, and they were informed of the stabbing.
The university sent one email notifying students of the stabbing nearly two hours after the stabbing, at around 1 a.m. from Joan Todd, executive director of public relations.
Pizzano said he does not know how the university could have responded differently, but he knows many students did not see the email until the next day.
“I think if they were going to do just an email, they should have done it sooner,” he said. “Who knows what he could have done if he was wandering around for two hours.”
Pizzano said he would press charges if his attacker were discovered. He met with UPD on Tuesday afternoon and was told they will review surveillance footage and continue to investigate.
Pizzano’s mother posted on his Facebook on Sunday, saying she was woken up to a call from her son saying he had been stabbed.
“Hug your loved ones, life can change in an instant! I’m SO — feeling blessed,” she wrote in the post.
The attack won’t stop him from going out on the weekends, he said, but he will avoid walking alone in the future and encourages other students to do the same.
“The only thing that kind of freaks me out about it [is] it could be a Ball State student, so he could be around me right now,” Pizzano said. “He could be around other people, and no one that knows he did it. I would hate for that to happen to someone else.”
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