Olympic medalist Kim Glass says she was brutally attacked on the street with a metal pipe

Olympic medalist Kim Glass says she was brutally assaulted on the street in an apparently random attack that left her with multiple facial fractures.

Glass, a volleyball player who competed with Team USA at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, took to Instagram to show her gruesome injuries and describe being assaulted while leaving a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles.

"This homeless man ran up," she said. "He had something in his hand. ... He just looked at me with some pretty hateful eyes, and as I turned to go tell my friend I think something's wrong with him … before I knew it, a big metal bolt —like pipe — hit me [in the face]."

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The Instagram video showed that Glass' right eye was bruised and swollen shut. She says she received stitches but that "right now, it looks like my vision will be okay." In a subsequent update, she noted she was "incredibly grateful to God that I'll be able to see" and won't need to undergo surgeries, noting that it "could have been so much worse" and that an ophthalmologist says "my retina is solid."

Police arrested the suspect, according to Glass, and video obtained by TMZ showed the bloody aftermath of the attack. She encouraged her fans to "be safe out there."

"I wasn't ready for it," she said. "There's a lot of mentally ill people on these streets right now. You shouldn't have to be fearful when you walk, but it's true."