Veteran Confronts Man Who Allegedly Raped Girl In Kroger Bathroom

A Marine veteran was shopping at Kroger when he heard a scream and a woman saying a man raped a girl in the store’s bathroom. That was all it took to send the veteran flying into action — and surveillance camera video captured it all.

Damian Austin, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, was shopping at a Kroger store in Savannah, Georgia on a Tuesday evening when a woman’s screams stopped him in his tracks. “It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck because it wasn’t a normal yell,” Austin recalled, according to KFOR.

Other shoppers also heard the screams, which were reportedly coming from the bathroom, and for a few moments, there was confusion in the store. Then, onlookers quickly realized the unimaginable had just occurred. The woman was allegedly sexually assaulted in the grocery store restroom after a man followed her inside, and the suspect had run out of the bathroom and tried to flee the scene, The Blaze reported.

That was all it took for the Marine veteran to fly into action. “A lady behind me just said, ‘He raped that girl in the bathroom,’ and once she said that there was nothing else for me to do besides go out the door after him,” Austin explained, and that’s exactly what he did. In a situation where others would run the other direction, the former Marine chased the suspect through the parking lot.

Eventually, Austin caught up with the suspect — later identified as 25-year-old Gregory Hathorne — in the back of a nearby Ace Hardware store, where he then ordered him onto the ground and held him at gunpoint. Security footage, obtained by WSAV, captured the exact moment Austin took Hathorne down.

“I told him to put his hands in the air. He complied and put them up,” Damian Austin recalled. “I told him to get on the ground, and he tried to say something, and I said, ‘Don’t say a word.’” As Austin held the man on the ground, a woman lent the Marine hero a hand, bringing a pack of large zip ties to him from the store.