WARNING: GRAPHIC REFERENCES TO ALLEGED SEXUAL ASSAULTS
A vacationing nurse, who rushed to the aid of two American women who reported sexual assaults at a Bahamas resort, said the scene that she walked into “was enough to scare me.”
LaDonna Batty was at the drink shack with her husband when “someone ran around the corner screaming, ‘Can you come help? Can you come help?’” said Batty, who was led to the resort’s front office.
Inside, Amber Shearer’s and Dongayla Dobson’s bathing suits were torn and “out of place,” she said. The lifelong friends faded in and out of consciousness while crying, vomiting and covered in bruises, the Arkansas nurse told Fox News Digital during a Zoom interview from her clinic on Wednesday.
Shearer blurted out that they were raped and kept repeating it, Batty said: “I have no disbelief at what happened. These girls had been assaulted and hurt. … I can tell this was a bad situation, and it was going to go south pretty quickly.”
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Amber Shearer and Dongayla Dobson were allegedly sexually assaulted during their vacation to the Bahamas. (Amber Nicole Shearer/Facebook)
Batty did not know either of the women. While she treated them, they were “girl one (Dobson) and girl two (Shearer).” It was pure coincidence that Batty was on the same cruise and took the same excursion to Pirate’s Cove resort on Grand Bahama Island.
That’s where lifelong friends Shearer and Dobson, from Kentucky, were allegedly drugged with a laced cocktail and attacked by two resort staff members, who have since been fired and arrested.
Dobson’s mother, Frankie King, told Fox News Digital in a previous interview that the women were found unconscious in a bathroom and received a heart-stopping text: “Call us now we’ve been drugged and raped.”
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Neither survivor remembered anything or how they got to the resort’s front office. That’s when Batty entered the picture.
“I knew something happened to them just by looking at them,” Batty said. “I could tell that they had been assaulted in some manner.”
She did not have many tools to work with, but she checked their vitals and documented their injuries and bruises, which she noted covered their legs. Shearer was slightly more alert than Dobson, according to the nurse, who tried to get as much information as she could to treat them.
LaDonna Batty, an Arkansas nurse who was at the same resort as two American women who were allegedly raped, talked to Fox News Digital from her clinic. (Chris Eberhart via Zoom/Fox News Digital)
The women suffered injuries during the alleged attack, including bruises on their bodies, they said. (Amber Nicole Shearer/Facebook)
While treating them, Batty said she watched the surveillance footage that resort employees were reviewing to find the suspected attacker, which they did and brought him into the front office so that the women could identify him as their alleged assailant.
“It escalated” after they saw him, Batty said. “They were terrified. They immediately started crying and getting louder and getting scared. They were trembling even more when they led him into the room.”
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The Bahamian resort, called Pirate’s Cove in Freeport, refuted Shearer’s and Dobson’s accusations in a statement, claiming the women’s allegations “conflict” with the resort’s 16 “time-stamped surveillance videos.”
Batty saw the comments and was taken back.
“I don’t know why they’re tearing their story apart,” she said. “But I have no disbelief about what happened to them.”
“When I walked in that room – and that’s all I can speak about is what I personally saw – I knew something happened by the way they looked and how they acted. … They were assaulted in some form or fashion. They were in complete shambles.”
Amber Shearer and Dongayla Dobson said they were given drinks laced with drugs before their alleged sexual assault at a Freeport resort in the Bahamas. (Amber Nicole Shearer/Facebook)
Suspect ‘leaning back and flipping through his phone’
The Royal Bahama Police Force said in a Feb. 4 statement that they arrested two men – ages 54 and 40 – in connection with the alleged sexual assaults. Their names were not released.
Batty only saw one of the suspects and said his presence made the women shake and cry. Their emotions heightened.
But the suspect appeared to be unfazed: “He wasn’t bothered at all when they brought him inside and he saw the women,” she said.
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After the survivors’ sudden traumatized recoil and screams, he was led outside, where he sat on a porch “leaning back in a chair and playing on his cellphone,” said Batty, as she mimicked someone lazily scrolling through their phone.
“He was waiting there like it was no big deal,” she said.
Pirate’s Cove said in a statement that both staff members were fired for “violating (the resort’s) zero-tolerance policy” for employees to fraternize with guests.
Two men were arrested after allegedly sexually assaulting two American women at Pirate’s Cove Beach in the Bahamas. (Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The resort acknowledged the serious accusations and confirmed that the Royal Bahamas Police Force is leading a criminal investigation in conjunction with the FBI.
But the resort’s official statement attempted to rip apart the women’s accusations and turned over the surveillance videos to law enforcement.
Luck continues at the airport
Batty said, even without knowing the women’s names, the case became personal for her.
She tried looking for them the next day but couldn’t find them. Dobson’s mother said it was a miracle that they ran into her at the airport in Florida after the cruise docked.
They both said Batty pushed to find Dobson and Shearer so that she could check on them personally.
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“She saved all that information. She made the notes and took care of them just like they were a patient of hers that came into her office or something,” King said.
“She was just so nice, and once we met her there at the airport, she made sure that they had all her information. She has called them or texted them every day to see how they’re doing.”
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‘I don’t want to say I saved them … I just do what I normally do’
King hailed Batty as a hero and could not thank her enough during a separate interview.
Batty said she did not “save them” and brushed it off as “doing what I normally do” as a nurse.
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“I have three daughters, and all I could think was that that could’ve been my daughters, and I hope somebody would help them,” Batty said. “Those girls are somebody’s mom, someone’s girlfriend, someone’s wife, someone’s sister, and someone did something to them.”
Fox News Digital’s Emily Robertson contributed to this report.
