Scars that Run Deep

Juanita Jimenez was affected in a subway attack in 2022, but the Bronx resident is using ink on skin to grapple with her physical and emotional scars.

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Juanita Jimenez, 23, didn’t leave her home today. She didn’t leave her home yesterday, and she won’t leave her home tomorrow. This setting has become her new normal. 

In her two bedroom apartment in the Bronx, she spends her time watching television, talking to friends and family on the phone, and cooking her favorite meal, rice and beans with chicken. Brown boxes cover the wooden floors of the apartment, two black chairs are the makeshift living room furniture, and three small plants thrive on the west-facing window sills. Jimenez says she loves plants because they “signify growth,” a motto she holds dear as she looks back on how her life has changed in the last two years. 

In her at-home tattoo shop in Queens, which she is currently moving to the Bronx, Jimenez reflects on how tattooing allows her to connect with clients on a deeper level. She enjoys the opportunity to exchange stories and emotions that create a unique bond outside of tattoos. Since Jimenez was little, her passion for drawing has propelled her to push through the adversity she’s faced, physically and emotionally. What she didn’t know is that art would also help her through the worst moment of her life.

Jimenez's lifelong aspiration is to become a doctor and help others. In December 2022, she was the one in need of help after a subway assault. Jimenez was figuring out her new route to her overnight shift at Kings County Hospital, where she assisted nurses and patients. Rodlin Gravesande, 34, followed her off the 2 train at Brooklyn's Winthrop station where Jimenez says she felt “something was wrong” just before Gravesande threw sulfuric acid at her and fled the scene. “It was excruciating pain,” says Jimenez. 

In New York, the purchase of sulfuric acid is controlled but not banned for individual use. This requires the intended use to be legal, and the substance must be handled safely. In the attack, “it had burned through my jacket, my coat, my hoodie, my mask, my scarf, it burned through everything,” Jimenez recalls.

In a teary moment, Juanita’s mother, Nicole Jimenez, recounts the call around midnight that turned her world upside down. “No parent ever wants to get that call. I guess a mother's intuition, I knew something was wrong.” She answered the phone, “and immediately my heart was ripped out of my chest.”

Her daughter’s road to recovery has been long and arduous. She battles depression, surgeries, and focusing on her interrupted plan to apply to medical school. She has undergone several surgeries to continue recovering from her injuries. Jimenez was not Gravesande’s first victim; another woman in New York suffered a similar acid attack. Jimenez reveals she was at her lowest at the time of assault. “I definitely sank back into a depression, and that I'm still honestly, not completely out of.” She adds that she is transparent with her family when she’s not okay and says, “even though I may be smiling and making jokes, like mentally, I'm just not where I need to be.” Jimenez also adds that she is not open to taking the subway again and relies on Uber for her transportation needs.

Now, she finds relief in the buzz of a tattoo gun in her hand, a business she launched just three months after the attack. “I never thought to be making this a career kind of thing, but I just started doing it and you know, it is kind of like tracing.”

What started out in her childhood drawing stick figures, has turned into intricate flower designs, snakes, mantras, and butterflies. She is still in the process of moving her business across boroughs, but in her home parlor she sees 13 people on average per month. “She's a very good artist and she was born doing that, “ says her mother, Nicole. Jimenez finds that everything around her reminds her of art, including the scar across her face.  “Art comes out of different types of emotions, grief, pain and even sometimes happiness, this is when creativity is most profound,” says Jimenez.

Her best friend, Ohanzee Rivera, says the scars remind him of a willow tree. Burn lines across her face represent the trunks; dark spots on her chin are the earth. Willow trees are known for their ability to bend without breaking and their ability to regrow broken branches and adapt to new conditions. For Jimenez, the willow tree means the need to start “pouring into myself,” to take a step back, prioritize herself, and come back as a stronger woman who can adapt to anything.  Jimenez adds, “I had to have boundaries with the people around me and I allow myself to feel my emotions.”

Tatiana Morales, Jimenez’s older sister, describes the shift she’s seen since the incident. Before the attack, Jimenez was “a jolly girl, just a fun, social, regular person,” she says. Now, “I do notice my sister is just not one hundred percent how she is. She's definitely getting back there, but it's just not how she used to be.” 

Yet Jimenez says she strives to find joy in simple things. Her loved ones help through bad days. Juanita has since moved back to the Bronx from Queens to be closer to them. “We all just got a really closer bond with each other,” says Jimenez, who says the incident has allowed her and her family to “put our barriers down with each other.”

Jimenez graduated this past May from Lehman College with a bachelor's in anthropology, biology, and chemistry. When she’s not preparing to take the MCAT, Jimenez is watching movies, cooking and obsessing over Zoe Saldaña in her current favorite Paramount+ show, “Special Ops: Lioness.”

The violent experience has allowed her to understand that she can “persevere through whatever” and has given her the courage to continue towards medical school. She will have the ability to connect with future patients who have gone through similar traumatic experiences, Jimenez adds. “I just went through literally the worst trauma of my entire life, that plenty of doctors can never even imagine going through, or dealing with a patient that has gone through that,” she says.

In June, Gravesande, originally from Atlanta, was sentenced to 12 years on first- and second-degree assault charges. Though it took two harmful incidents to bring justice for Jimenez, her family and the other victim. “It made me feel good that the girl [Gravesande] was in jail, off the streets, because the way that I had felt in that hospital, I wouldn't wish that on anybody,” says Jimenez. Even two years later, Jimenez’s mother’s feelings are as strong as when the incident happened. “I still hate this person. I’m still angry with the world. I’ve never been one to wish bad on anyone, but I wish she would drop dead.”

But Jimenez describes her life since the assault as similar to the butterflies that she passionately draws and tattoo: She “got into a cocoon” when the attack occurred, but now calls herself an “organized butterfly,” admiring how the insects have so many colors and patterns but still symbolize freedom and transformation.

“My life is so different from two years ago. If I would have told myself two years ago that this would have happened, I would be devastated,” she says. But she is happy about how things in her life have unfolded since. Like a butterfly, she is “free to do whatever I really want to do now.”