Yes, I noticed that too. It seems political correctness trumps public safety these days.

You know for certain that the suspect is not white; if that were the case, his race would be front and center of the reporting.

Media outlets have long-established policies of covering up the color of crime--unless suspects are white. Seeing as an extremely disproportionate amount of crime is done by blacks and hispanics, liberals in the media want to do as much as possible to hide this from the public in order to push their usual anti-white, left-wing, Marxist politically correct agenda and try to deceive everyone. They say they "don't want to reinforce negative stereotypes." BARF

I think she did herself proud. Here's the informal report that I read: "They fought, and she continually hit him in the head with her flashlight until he ran off. "

The police have not released his race. They said they hope to have a more detailed description and maybe a composite tomorrow.

I'm going to assume that Karen wasn't given a description that included skin color or ethnicity, not that she purposely left it out.

Yes, I assumed the police didn't mention race or color to Karen as well.

Nonsense, media outlets have an agenda, which shows in their continual, deliberate obscuring of race when the perps are non-white. If a suspected perpetrator is reported as white, that aspect is usually made known prominently.

This guy is at large, and liberals want to hide the facts about race so as not to offend the usual offenders--public safety be damned.

If the police themselves are refusing to release his race, they too are part of the political agenda to drive a false narrative and hide the facts. Not long ago, the Herndon police actually featured the Orwellian statement on their website that "diversity" is a "superior attribute of an individual" when seeking employment with the Herndon police department. Finally, after being aware of such disgustingly leftist, anti-white male language promulgated on the part of the Town of Herndon, I attended a Herndon town council candidates meet-and-greet, and challenged all present to defend the website's anti-white agenda. It was a highly contentious encounter, but guess what? Within mere days, the entire web page had been re-written, without any of the anti-white language. The moral of the story: Speak up, white males! You must speak up and stop this vendetta against you everywhere!

Way to blame the victim. Next you'll claim her clothing was provocative?

I use the W&OD a lot, and even in the winter there are usually a decent number of people out at 7pm. She wasn't exactly in a low-traffic area either.

Blaming the victim is always a terrible idea. What if she was walking home from work and had no other way to get home. We don't know what the circumstances were. On this issue of race identification, the police should release the race of the perpetrator, if it is known. The assailant is still at large and other women are at risk. They have specifics on this attacker, i.e. heavyset, short black hair. Why not identify his race/

We women pay taxes just like men and have equal rights to use the trail at dark just like men. If it isn't safe for women to be out on the trail then maybe it is time to ban all men from using the trail from dusk onwards.

Robert Peer's comment is similar to how men in places like Saudi Arabia justify keeping women under lock and key in their country.

Shameful on all accounts.

I don't endorse victim-blaming at all, but I have to respond to Kathy's comment about "equal rights to use the trail at dark." The W&OD park (trail) is NOT open after dark. Everyone using it after dark (and I know there are a lot of us!) is technically trespassing on park property. From the NVRPA web site: "W&OD Trail Hours: The park is open all year, from dawn to dusk."

John - A complete and accurate description of the perp helps solves crimes and protect the citizens of the area by helping get these types off the streets pronto. Someone had a better description than that reported. It has nothing to do with racism. Care to explain how providing a complete description of this criminal, including race, is racist?

+1 and kudos to her for fighting off the bad guy!

Wow, Louisa! Talk about painting with a broad brush. Either you've never heard of the massive genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Sudan, etc. in recent years, all perpetrated by 'brown skinned people' as you say, or those genocides don't fit nicely with you anti-white meme.
Yes, by all means lets not identify the race of this criminal because it may be 'hurtful'. In the meanwhile he's free to drag our daughters, sisters, wives, mothers into the bushes at will. But at least we can all say that we didn't hurt his feelings by accurately describing him.
This is a perfect example of how liberalism kills folks. Behold it in all its glory.

Louisa, FBI victimization reports and overall crime statistics show that black males commit over 50% of all murders and rapes in this country, and that black and hispanic males are responsible for the exteremely disproportionate share of crime overall--rapes, robberies, murders, carjackings, home invasions, burglaries, assaults, and so on. This is the truth, whether you like it or not.

If the media is guilty of anything, they are guilty of covering all of this up by having in place official editorial policies which omit race when the suspects are non-white. You really are full of falsehood here. Major media outlets have actually admitted to these policies, acknowledging that it is part of a social-engineering agenda to attempt to drive the politically-correct narrative and shield minorities from "negative stereotypes."

Louisa, the suspect's other identifiers in this case are listed. Furthermore, a suspect can change their clothing, their hair and hair color, their weight, facial hair, etc., but cannot change their race, so it is a key identifier. The omission here is blatantly political, as is so much of the reporting and outright deception practiced by government and media outlets today. Crucial aspects of the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case have repeatedly been shown to have been shamelessly manipulated by dishonest, disgraceful media such as NBC and ABC, with audio, video, and still photos intentionally edited and distorted to frame Zimmerman. This kind of garbage, the same kind of Mike Nifong chicanery that got the Duke LaCrosse team railroaded until the lies of the prosecution and other parties were exposed, is rampant in our PC society. The rare event of actual white-on-black violence is pounced upon by rabid media and leftist government agencies such as Eric Holder's corrupt racist regime, the Dept. of Black Panthers, and the flames are fanned with agenda-driven treachery until the facts finally surface. During one recent year, not a single case of a white male raping a black female was recorded in the FBI's entire national database of statistics, yet of course black males raped white females by the thousands and thousands.

Louisa, white people are the smallest demographic in the world, a global minority, and have been enslaved the most throughout history--the word "slave" comes from the same word referring to whites of the Southeastern European region, Slavics. Black Muslims in Northern Africa held upwards of a million captured whites as slaves during the same period that Africans were held by whites here in America; entire villages and areas along the European coast of the Mediterranean were deserted for decades because of plundering and slaving raids conducted by the Barbary corsairs. Learn some history other than the PC falsehoods taught in the public schools and universities.

America's history is one of whites actually rising up against tyranny, of breaking the eons-old paradigm of slavery and oppression of one group by another. Hundreds of thousands of white men died to END slavery in this hemisphere. The experience of whites enslaving blacks here on this continent is relatively brief, in terms of the overall span of history. Blacks here now are better off than blacks anywhere on the planet, many of whom are dying to get here to enjoy the comparative good life that whites have legislated, with over 50 years of affirmative action, welfare, contract set-asides, housing and medical upon demand, etc., yet blacks are taught by people like you to hate whites, to hate America, and to attack and murder and rape and loot and rob by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Ice-T, and the rest...

In the overall span of history up to the present, slavery and oppression has most definitely NOT been an especially peculiar feature of whites as regards other races; moreover, it has really just been mainly the way of the world until Christian whites led the way to change the paradigm and put in place a culture of civilization that rejects such old ways. Based on the state of race relations in America now, and based on the economic devastation and mayhem wrought by decades of black violence, depravity, and abuse of Lyndon johnson's "Great Society" runaway welfare train wreck of trillions of dollars down the hole, I'd say it's blacks who owe whites reparations!