Former LA deputy DA was attacked by same man who nearly blinded Kim Glass
The troubled felon accused of almost blinding Olympian Kim Glass in Los Angeles previously attacked a prosecutor — who is blaming woke officials for allowing the “entirely predictable and preventable” violence.
Irene Lee was a deputy district attorney in LA when Semeon Tesfamariam randomly attacked her while she was on a coffee break in August 2020.
“He just came up behind me and he socked me. I felt like a car or bike had hit me and I started stumbling forward and just crying,” she told KCAL9.
At the time, Tesfamariam had already “attacked three women, two of them with a golf club and a hammer” — as well as another “where he’d gone after a young woman with a metal pipe and struck her numerous times,” the ex-prosecutor told Fox News.
At sentencing in her case, Lee asked the judge, “How many more women does this defendant have to hurt for it to matter?,” she told Fox.
“As a victim, when I spoke at the sentencing, I felt like I wasn’t being heard,” Lee told KCAL9 of the judge, who was not identified in the reports.
“The judge was fully aware of his history — even more privy to it than I am,” she stressed.
“I believe that there were enough red flags before the court to say, ‘You know what, this guy, he can’t be out there on the streets. He’s a danger,'” she told Fox.
“The writing was on the wall,” she insisted in both interviews.
Current LA DA George Gascon — who is facing recall efforts over his own soft-on-crime policies — confirmed that Tesfamariam, who turned 52 on Saturday, was on probation when he was accused of attacking silver medal-winning volleyball player Glass, 37, on July 8.
He admitted that Tesfamariam had convictions for felony assault, but was free despite having “a troubling history of attacking apparently random people with dangerous weapons.”
Lee said her attacker’s freedom to harm other women was proof that “there’s a climate of preferential treatment for violent offenders over that of law-abiding citizens.”
“There’s just this climate, this feeling, that people will get off without any real consequence and that people are focusing on the violent criminals over the victims who are being daily victimized,” she told Fox.
“I believe that Kim’s attack was entirely predictable and preventable. This shouldn’t have happened to her,” she said of the athlete-turned-model attacked with a 10-inch metal bolt.
Glass initially feared she’d been blinded — and Lee suggested it could have been even worse than that.
“By the grace of God, Kim is alive and healing, but I just can’t imagine if he bashed her head in and she died. It would be just another murder in downtown LA,” she told KCAL9.
“I feel like this is entirely preventable.”
