Yvette Edmunds has every reason to be angry, even afraid. The man who once attacked her is the face so many now can’t get out of their minds.
“They just keep throwing him out there until when? Until he kills somebody?” she questioned with tears in her eyes. “This is an ongoing thing with this man.”
Yet mixed with her anger, is a heart full of empathy.
“I don’t want to call him a monster because I don’t think he is,” Edmunds told CBS News Colorado’s Kelly Werthmann. “I forgave him a long time ago, Solomon. I just think that the system has failed him.”
Edmunds first saw Solomon Galligan in 2021 while walking near the Denver County Courthouse. Out of nowhere, she said, he knocked her to the ground.
“It was one punch,” she said.
One punch, seven stitches and three years of court battles. Edmunds said the judge dismissed the felony assault case due to a lack of resources.
“That’s what she said. ‘We don’t have the resources in the jail cells to give [Galligan] his medicine, to give him what he needs and the beds are full,'” Edmunds said. “I didn’t understand why they let him go knowing that, every time they let him go, he does something. Every time.”