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Brittni Borrero is tired but very alert today. She’s noticing every little thing happening around her, with leftover nerves from Tuesday night when she was robbed at gunpoint.

Around 9 p.m., the graduate student was walking her usual route home from Franklin Hall. She left class early that night. She says if she hadn’t, she may have missed crossing paths with the men who robbed her.

“It was just a normal night,” Borrero says. “I noticed three male figures walking toward me. I didn’t really think anything of it because people are always walking home or to their friends’. This is a pretty populated area.”

She stands in the spot where the incident occurred — on Lincoln Street near Dartmouth Place apartments between the two fields that sit on opposite sides of the road. The area is poorly lit. Two street lights sit about 100 yards apart in the spot where Borrero was robbed.

During the robbery, she was on the phone with her boyfriend. When she crossed paths with the men, they stopped. She stopped and faced them.

One of the men, an African-American with a thin mustache and a green nylon jacket, asked her for her money. She told him she didn’t have any money. He took out a silver gun, cocked it and aimed it at her midsection. Her answer wasn’t good enough, so he asked again.

“He said, ‘don’t make any noise or sudden movements,” Borrero recalls. “’Give me all your money.’ And I told him I didn’t have any because I didn’t.”

Borrero felt an adrenaline-like sensation move from her stomach through her entire body and became very hot. She said none of the men made eye contact with her and the other two men stayed silent the entire time.

He rolled his neck and demanded her purse. She gave it to him. He took it, getting away with her laptop.

Borrero ran up the hill behind her while the trio ran across the street to a rusty, candy-apple-red Pontiac that pulled up onto the pavement in the field to pick them up. Borrero hung up with her boyfriend and called the police. The people walking by made her nervous, and she wanted to leave the area, but the police dispatcher told her to stay on the phone and stay in that spot.

She walked back to the pavement where the robbery occurred and watched the Pontiac drive away. Within minutes, a Kent State police officer in an SUV pulled up and let Borrero in. They waited on a nearby street for the Kent City Police to arrive.

After the incident, Borrero blasted a text message to all her friends and acquaintances in Kent, telling them about what happened to her and to be careful and alert.

“A lot of times you don’t take those campus alerts seriously until something happens to someone close to you,” she says.

Borrero’s mother drove an hour and a half from Cambridge to stay the night with her that night. The following morning, a friend kept her company until her father, Juvenal Borrero, arrived in his leather jacket and matching leather gloves to take care of his daughter. He warns people his daughter’s age to be more alert of people walking in the night and get off of their cell phones.

“Life can change in the fraction of a second,” he says. “With three individuals, it could have been worse. It could have been a rape. She could have been killed. She’s been blessed.”

Kent City Police are still investigating the robbery.

Contact Dwayne Yates at [email protected].