Wheelchair-Bound Woman Alleges Sexual Assault During Pedicure In Salon; Man Arrested

A 24-year-old man has been arrested after a wheelchair-bound woman alleged she was sexually assaulted by him during a pedicure in an Illinois salon.

Peter Tran, 24, of St Louis, was charged Wednesday with two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, aggravated battery of a handicapped person, and public indecency, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

The incident happened Sunday. According to Shenelle Johnson, she went to Lynn Nails at Fairview Heights, the salon she has been visiting for years, to get her eyebrows done and also got a manicure and pedicure.

Talking about the incident, Johnson, who is paralyzed from the waist down, told police that as she was getting a pedicure from Tran, he used her foot to sexually gratify himself, the report said.

According to the woman, the man thought that his actions were concealed from view by a table, but she used her phone to record him, which she later showed to police.

"I had told him from the beginning, I said, 'well I'm paralyzed from the waist down,'" Johnson told KMOV. "I felt my feet slide up under something at first, and I looked at him strange. He said, 'Do you feel this, do you feel this?' And I'm like 'What?' and he said, 'Don't worry about it," she added.

Johnson says her suspicions arose as Tran kept asking her whether she could feel anything. That's when she decided to sneak her phone under the table.

"I snuck my phone under the table, and I kept joking with him over the table so he wouldn't think nothing suspicious was going on," the woman added.

But then, her phone ran out of charge during the recording. However, after she got into her car and charged her phone, she was stunned to find what the man did. Johnson then filed a formal report with the Fairview Heights Police Department.

"When I watch this video, this can't be the first time. It doesn't look like it. I would've never thought nothing like this to do up under a nail table," Johnson said.

Meanwhile, the KMOV report said that the owner of the salon, Lynn Kim, later posted on Facebook that Tran was “set up” by Johnson and claimed that he is easily tricked by others. Tran has since been fired from his job.

He is being held at the St. Clair County Jail on $85,000 bail.