Sarah Anderson was walking from the Bethesda Metro station when she was jumped late last month, attacked by a man who tried to wrestle away her iPhone.

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Anderson, 25, fought back. The guy, she says, was a bit scrawny and she wasn't willing to give up on the phone easily. She struggled with him — until he punched her in the face and fled. In response, Anderson dropped her purse and went after her phone.

"The police officer was definitely like, 'OK next time just let it go,'" she says. "But I wasn't really thinking."

Anderson was left with a black eye, and got stuck using a spare company BlackBerry, which convinced her to pay up for another iPhone. Her old phone, wiped clean after the incident, was never recovered. It was only answered once after the theft, and that was a call from her persistent boyfriend, who kept dialing Anderson's number.

"Well, my boyfriend was pretty pissed," she says. "Typical guy reaction. He was just really mad that he wasn't there."

The robbery happened in broad daylight. It wasn't far from a Metro station, which as TBD has previously noted, is often kind of like home base for iPhone thieves. And it happened while Anderson was checking her e-mail and had her earbuds in.

"I kind of definitely stopped listened to music as much as I did, and made sure I was looking around me," Anderson says of her post-attack routine changes.

But she's sticking with an iPhone, and says that next time, she'll be ready. Her friends wondered asked her why she fought back at all. Anderson says she wondered whether she should take a kickboxing class, so fight will have a different ending.

"They just opened a new gym on St. Elmo Street," she says. "So I might."