Possible Vs Plausible

The "blame the victim" crowd generally pisses me off... I've got a hyper sense of empathy and it doesn't take much to trigger it. And I do believe that there are very bad people out there, even among those who share my political passions. That said... does anyone else find this story somewhat lacking in credibility?

When I first read about the McCain campaign worker being "mutilated" by a psychotic Obama supporter I was horrified. OMG... mutilated!! A "B" carved into the poor woman's face by some monster with a freaking knife!! And then I read the part about how she refused medical assistance and I thought, "huh?" She was attacked and had her face carved up and she refused medical assistance... that seems odd. What about her face? What if she has a concussion from having her head punched?

And then I saw the picture, above. I'm not sure that looks like a knife carving to me. Why is it backwards? It's plausible that her attacker was dyslexic, or that he was standing above her head when he was carving it... but if he was standing above her to carve it, assuming it required two hands to both hold her head and hold the knife, and assuming she was then able to fight him with her arms, wouldn't it be more jaggedy? That nice roundy B seems kind of deliberate and artful... it's hard to believe it's the result of some frenzied, crazy freak on a public street. It occurs to me that the B looks more like fingernail scratching, like the kind my sister and I used to leave on each other after some childhood fight. It could have been done with the edge of a knife but again, even if the poor woman was in shock and not struggling at all, how could the attacker have gotten that B so smooth without breaking the skin at any point? I couldn't carve the skin off of a potato that evenly.

It also seems weird that he got his money and let her go and then noticed a bumper sticker on her car and went back to inflict some personal damage. This looks like a well lit public street in a populated area... an attack could have happened that way but it seems odd that it would.

All of this is not to say it's impossible her story is entirely true... certainly it could be. It just seems more probable (to me) that it's only partly true. Obviously she got that black eye somewhere. Quite possibly she was robbed. Quite possibly she was robbed by a viscous Obama supporter. But that B... something about that just seems funky to me.

At any rate, we hope the best for the woman, whatever the circumstances may be.

As an aside: Why didn't the Pittsburgh police take a photo of her face? That seems like very sloppy police work given the type of attack.