BELMAR, CO (KCNC/CNN) - Heather Piper didn’t expect to come out of a movie theater looking the way she did Tuesday night.
“I had blood everywhere, I mean, my face was covered in blood all the way down my shirt, all the way down to my shoes,” she said.
Days later, it’s hard not to notice her black eye.
Piper was beat up outside the Century 16 Theater in Belmar by a teen she says was among a group that was crawling over seats and being loud during a movie.
“I asked them to be quiet several times and they wouldn’t, and I finally just yelled at them to ‘shush,’” she said of the teens.
Another moviegoer told security about the teens, according the Piper, which kept the group quiet for the rest of the movie.
But as Piper and her two friends left the theater, one of the raucous teens confronted her.
“She’s screaming and just punched me on the side of the head,” Piper said. She said she didn’t fight back because she’s a foster parent and didn’t want to jeopardize her license.
“I said, ‘What are you doing? What is wrong with you?’” she recalled of her exchange with the teen. "And she lost it. She started hitting me again and she started crying, saying, ‘Well, you called me ghetto.’”
When asked if she made that remark, Piper said, “I probably did.”
Eventually, the teen ran off, leaving Piper with a fractured nose and several bruises and scratches.
“For someone to not have, I guess, the mental capacity to use their words to express themselves, to immediately have to go into violence, is a scary thing,” she said.
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