EUSEBIO: STRANGER FOLLOWED WOMAN AND THROTTLED HER IN BAR TOILET
A sales assistant wept in court as she described how she thought she was going to die when a stranger strangled her in a toilet in an apparently random attack.
Pedro Santos Eusebio, 30, followed Ashka-Leigh De Goede into the ladies lavatories at the cocktail bar where she worked, it is claimed.
He then locked himself into a cubicle with her and throttled her until she passed out before fleeing into the street, jurors heard.
But the victim later recovered consciousness and was able to give a description of her attacker to police, who tracked him down using CCTV footage, it is said.
A tearful Miss De Goede told jurors at Southwark Crown Court that she had never seen her attacker before she was attacked on the afternoon of November 25 last year.
The South African national said she worked in the sales team for the company which owned the Verve cocktail bar Upper St Martin’s Lane in Central London.
Shortly before 4pm on the day of the attack she went to the customer toilets on the top floor of the bar.
Jurors heard she passed a stranger wearing a blue beanie hat in the communal area in front of the toilets, but ‘didn’t think anything of it.’
Miss De Goede told the court that shortly afterwards, immediately after she had flushed the lavatory, she opened the cubicle door and saw the same man standing in front of her.
‘I thought maybe he was lost,’ she said. ‘It happens. People get mixed up, and as I said “are you lost?”, he punched me in the face.’
The court heard that Santos Eusebio then pushed Miss De Goede backwards into the cubicle.
She told the jury: ‘I actually watched him lock the door, and I realised I was in trouble and tried to hit him, [but] I’m not strong, and I couldn’t do anything.
‘He never said anything. He had the angriest eyes I’ve ever seen.
‘I thought I had done something to hurt him. He just glared at me the whole time.’
The witness said the man grabbed her neck and forced her head down towards the toilet.
She said she had the impression that he was trying to pull out her windpipe.
She said she had repeatedly kicked he toilet door to make noise and tried to shout for help from a colleague ‘but nobody came.’
‘At some points I managed to ask him why he was doing this to me, and he never answered me,’ she said.
She said she also tried pretending to pass out, and also attempted to hit her attacker in the genitals, but that ‘because I was losing consciousness, what I thought was [a] hard [blow]
She added: ‘I thought I was dead.’
Jurors heard that when Miss De Goede came to, her head was wedged beneath a partition between two cubicles and her attacker had gone.
She said she still couldn’t breathe and thought she had been dreaming until she saw she was still in the toilet, but that she then managed to walk to the bar office and tell colleagues what had happened.
The jury was later shown CCTV footage of a man the prosecution saw is Santos Eusebio leaving the bar toilets soon after the time of the attack.
Santos Eusebio, of (Flat 5, Block A) Peabody Buildings, Wild Street, Aldwych, Central London, denies attempted murder and attempting to choke.
The trial continues.
ENDS
