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A pregnant woman was severely injured in a dog attack in Kansas.
Audrey Suarez was walking through an apartment complex in Topeka when a pit bull viciously attacked her on July 17. According to WIBW 13 News, she was 24 weeks pregnant with twins at the time.
The Topeka Police said a fight broke out between three people in the area, per the outlet. The 6-year-old son of one of the individuals involved then let two dogs out, one of which attacked Suarez.
“She’s walking to my cousin’s house and then I guess they were having a fight or something over there,” Suarez’s boyfriend C.J. Austin told WIBW. “Her face was hanging off, it was horrible.”
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Suarez survived the attack along with her unborn babies, but she was left with “severe injuries to her face,” according to a GoFundMe.
“She had ended up breaking her pinky because when the dog was attacking her, all she could think about was covering her stomach, so the dog wouldn’t get to her stomach and hurt the twins,” Austin told WIBW.
Over $2,000 has been raised toward the expectant mother’s medical fees.
A man suffered minor injuries as he attempted to get the dog off of Suarez. “If it wasn’t for the gentleman — our friend who stepped in — he said the dogs would have killed her,” Austin recalled.
The incident is being investigated by the Topeka Police Department.
Suarez has since undergone a 10-hour surgery on her face, which was mutilated in the attack, and a four-hour surgery on her eye, which she almost lost, per WIBW.
The dog involved in the attack was shot and killed by the Topeka Police after becoming “aggressive” with an officer at the scene, per WIBW. The other dog was sent to Animal Control.
The owner of the dogs, who hasn’t been publicly identified, alleges that she was jumped by two individuals involved in the fight.
“Those dogs weren’t doing any harm. They were protecting my 6-year-old son while they were jumping me and ain’t nobody else helping me,” she told WIBW.
Austin said of the attack, “You just mess somebody’s whole life up. She’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life. She has nightmares of that dog attacking her. She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming…”
PEOPLE has reached out to the Topeka Police for comment.