Tracy Otto: Paralysed by her ex-boyfriend, now a Paralympian
In September 2019, Otto broke up with a boyfriend. A month previously, he had been arrested for attacking her at their home in Riverview, Florida.
Otto was ready to move on with her life, and had met someone new.
“I had just started talking to Ricky,” she told the BBC World Service’s Sportshour programme. “We met on 26 September 2019, and we went on a couple of dates.
“I had broken up with my ex, kicked him out, told him to leave, he gathered all of his things, he was gone and I had changed all of the locks on my house. Everything was done.
“That night it was 24 October 2019, we had another little date, and we go off to bed. I remember rolling over and getting comfortable in bed and drifting off to sleep.
“And then all of a sudden, I hear this loud noise and I see a flashlight in my face and I was so confused.
“And then I heard his voice, and I realised it was my ex.
“He had parked his car at the front of my house, went around the back of the house and looked through my bedroom window. We were sleeping, and he had decided to go to purchase a high-powered pellet gun.
“He did the best that he could to get as close to a real gun as possible. And a knife and a set of handcuffs.
“And he comes back to my house, breaks in and wakes us up, screaming at us to get out of bed.
“He tells us that he’s going to kill us and that if he didn’t kill himself, he was going to call the police.
“So, he outright told us what he was going to do. This is where everything gets kind of blurry because it happened so quickly. I can tell you what I know happened, I just don’t have it first hand because my brain just kind of blocked everything out.”
The attacker punched Otto multiple times before shooting Riessle twice in the face and stabbing him in the back, causing his lung to collapse.
He then shot Otto through the left eye, before stabbing her in the back of the neck, leaving her paralysed. He then sexually assaulted her.
“And he ends up calling the police on himself and tells them that ‘this is my name, ‘this is where I’m at’. He calls me his girlfriend, but then later admits to the police that we had broken up,” Otto says.
“And he was like, ‘I just killed my girlfriend and her new boyfriend’. They show up, he’s sitting in the driveway, and he gets taken away.”
In January 2023, the ex-boyfriend pleaded guilty to two counts of burglary with assault, two counts of attempted murder in the first degree, one count of sexual battery and two counts of aggravated bodily harm.
He was sentenced to 40 years in jail.
