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Breadfruit thrown through bus window, breaks woman’s nose

Posted at 12:21 PM, Jan 01, 2018
and last updated 2018-01-01 12:21:43-05

Ka’a’awa, Hawaii (KITV) — A holiday trip turned violent for a Utah woman who was assaulted while on a tour bus. Now, she’s asking the public for help finding the criminals.

Valerie Staley Zaugg was having fun on her Hawaiian vacation, just moments before her trip turned to terror. She was on the tour bus leaving Polynesian Cultural Center when, no more than ten minutes into the drive in Ka`a`awa, she saw someone throw something at the bus.

“It hit the glass and went straight back to my head and I was like, ‘What just happened?'” recounts Zaugg.

Blood, everywhere. Confusion on board. “I stood up and started screaming, ‘Pull over, pull over, pull over!’ I don’t think anybody knew what happened other than the glass broke. My husband thought it was a gunshot.”

It was a hard breadfruit, the size of a baseball. Glass shattered. A shard went in her eye.

“Everyone was in shock, like, ‘What just happened?'” continues Zaugg.

Paramedics treated her. Police took a report. A neighbor captured surveillance video that he thought may be the culprits.

Zaugg says he reviewed the security video and told her, “He said, ‘Hey, I have got three boys running through my yard right near where it happened,’ He could hear them laughing.”

She wants those responsible to be caught. Locals told her it’s not the first time. “This has been happening with eggs and small rocks. But to this extent, they haven’t seen somebody get hurt like this. Does somebody have to die before something is being done?”

She had switched seats with a family. Had she not, a small child would have been sitting in that seat.

This was the first full day of Zaugg’s vacation and she spent the rest of the trip bruised and sore. Zaugg is a nurse practitioner and believes she broke her nose and fractured the bones around her eye. She just returned home to Utah and will see her doctor on Monday.

In the meantime, she’s asking the public to help police catch the suspects. “You’re not going to get away with it. You could have killed somebody.”