On a street outside her apartment in West Hollywood, California, Theresa Saldana sensed that bystanders were near, but nobody was coming closer to help her despite her screams. On that sunny morning, her 46-year-old stalker viciously stabbed her with a steak knife with a 5-inch blade.
Fighting for her life, Saldana, then 27, kicked at the Scottish drifter, who was about 6 inches taller than her, and she suffered wounds to her left hand when, at one point, she grabbed the knife blade to try to stop the attack.
“Never in my life will I forget the indescribable horror I felt when I stared into the assailant’s eyes and realized that his intention was to murder me,” Saldana later wrote. As others in the neighborhood where Saldana lived failed to intervene on March 15, 1982, Jeffrey Alan Fenn ran toward the disturbing screams. Delivering bottled water nearby, Fenn, 26, had no weapon for protection, nor did he know that the assailant was obsessed with his victim, an actress, who had appeared in films including “Raging Bull.”
“Just as I felt the last of my strength slip away, I looked up and saw an angel. There behind the assailant was a tall, beautiful blond man. As if in slow motion, I saw him pull the attacker away from me,” Saldana wrote, describing Fenn in her 1986 book, “Beyond Survival,” which recounted the nearly fatal ambush and her recovery from her wounds.
Saldana was hospitalized for more than three months as she recovered from 10 stab wounds to her chest, arms, hands, and legs. Fenn, who forced the assailant to the ground and restrained him, avoided physical injury.
The rescue was life-altering for both Saldana and Fenn, who forged a friendship as they both devoted their lives afterward to public safety. As one of the most prominent stalking victims at that time, Saldana formed an organization, Victims for Victims, and advocated for anti-stalking laws, which were not enacted until the 1990s.
Two years after the attack, Saldana bravely played herself in a made-for-television movie, “Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story.” By then, Fenn had committed himself to a career in public service. In May 1983, he became a deputy for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Saldana attended his swearing-in.
“I owe Jeff my life, so I’m here because I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for Jeff,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I wanted to be here to show him how proud I am for him.”
Fenn told the same reporter that he just did what came naturally.
“You see something wrong being done, you do something about it. It’s that simple.”
In its investigation for Fenn’s award, the Hero Fund was unable to determine why only Fenn acted from among several witnesses.
In 2004, when Saldana and Fenn both appeared on an episode of “Larry King Live” on CNN, Fenn told the talk-show host that he saw others looking toward the street as he looked down from a balcony. Fenn saw a struggle, but he wasn’t sure if it was a domestic dispute or something like a robbery.
As it turns out, two years earlier, Fenn had stopped an unarmed purse-snatcher and held him for police, according to the Hero Fund’s records.
“But when I saw everyone kind of watching it like it was a Shakespearean play or something, I went up to at least break it up,” Fenn explained to King. “And that’s when I grabbed the individual, the male from behind, and found at that time that he had a knife.”
Saldana’s attacker later was found guilty and went to prison, yet continued to harass Saldana – and Fenn – by mailing death threats, leading to more criminal charges. After confessing in 1996 to a decades-old murder in England, the assailant was extradited overseas and died in 2004.
— Chris Foreman, assistant investigations manager