SEATTLE — The sons of an elderly woman who was beaten and had her finger bitten off during a brutal robbery are speaking out in hopes of getting the man responsible captured.
An 88-year-old Emma Cotton was on the back porch of her Rainier Beach home when the attack happened on Oct. 13.
According to her sons, the thief badly beat their mother for her jewelry and bit her right index finger off when he couldn’t pull a ring off of it.
“I can’t say on camera how I felt about that. To see my mother’s finger bitten off, and her still being calm about it,” Ricky Stuart Cotton, one of the victim’s sons, said. “I don’t know how many drugs they’d given her at the time, but it almost made me faint to look at it.”
Cotton spent three days in the ICU with a brain bleed. She also suffered multiple fractures.
“My mother’s head was as big as the size of a basketball,” Marvin Charles Cotton, the victim’s other son, said. “I didn’t recognize her.”
Cotton’s sons told KIRO 7 their mother is now out of the hospital.
She is recovering at a rehab facility, where she is starting to get back to her normal self.
Doctors were not able to reattach her finger because it was never found.
“He took it with him,” Ricky Cotton said. “It wasn’t found anywhere on the scene.”
The suspect was spotted by a pair of nearby surveillance cameras, but has not been arrested.
Cotton’s sons hope someone will recognize him.
They provided KIRO 7 with an image of the ring that was bitten off, in the hope that someone might recognize it, too.
Cotton’s sons said their mother is a deeply religious woman and has already forgiven the robber.
However, her sons still want the suspect arrested so he can’t do the same thing to another defenseless old woman.
“He was just brutal,” Ricky Cotton said. “She was trying to give him the jewelry, and he was just assaulting her like she was a man.”
Cotton’s sons are not yet sure when their mother will be able to return to her home.
Anyone with information on the suspect is asked to call SPD’s violent crimes tip line at (206)233-5000.
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