Extreme Fear

Your story is appropriately chilling, and what you saw was likely exactly what you thought you saw....you were being appraised as a target. Your awareness of that appraisal, and your reaction to it, is likely what prevented you from becoming a target of some kind in that moment.
I have a dear friend, a woman, highly attractive and athletic, who found herself walking alone, carrying two plastic bags of groceries on a sidewalk towards the door of her apartment building. She became aware, somehow, that the street was unusually empty of pedestrians, with the exception of one man on the sidewalk across the street, walking towards her, but seeming to be distinctly not looking at her. For the next 10 feet of her journey, she continued to watch him as she walked, and noticed, even from 200 feet away, somehow, that his head was turned slightly away, as if he was looking at the scene to his left....but there was literally nothing interesting to look at in that direction.
She stopped.
He stopped.

In the reaction of a moment, she dropped her bags and ran (she is very fast, she is an Ultimate player) towards the door to the alcove of her building. She had her keys out of her pocket (she did not carry a purse) and in the door as she hit it, opened it, ran inside and slammed it AS THE MAN HIT THE OUTSIDE OF THE DOOR AT FULL SPEED.
He pounded at the door for a second while glaring/staring at her, then ran off.

She listened to her intuition, as you did, and avoided becoming a victim that day. Had she waited longer, or been less fit, the story would have a much different ending.

Always believe your intuition as the first response.

I think it's a deep part of our mammalian heritage to assert dominance wherever we can. When we're young, we're still learning to do this in a nuanced, effective way, and our lack of skill can often manifest as bullying. Of course, taken to extremes this cruelty can be pathological.

Probably true-- which would explain why mentally & physically handicapped children are almost invariably the first to be picked on, with overweight kids running a close second. It's the parental attitudes that really confound me, though. I once had the bizarre experience of dealing with a parent who was sick with worry when her own daughter was being shunned and bullied (NB that this was undoubtedly a 'payback' situation as this girl had previously been a perpetrator of bullying). However, a month or two later, this parent displayed *absolutely no concern whatsoever* when someone else's child was being victimized.

I recently watched an interview with child predators on Oprah not to long ago, and yes the child predators would choose the quieter child or child whom looked to be neglected.

I definitely think that we can learn to act more confident. In fact, I was recently reading an interesting article which made the point that merely by changing our posture to a more dominant stance we can increase our levels of testosterone. Act confident, be confident.

Confidence is a lie.
Fake it until you make it.

Con-job = confidence. APPEAR confident and you are confident, for all intents and purposes. If you have inner fears, qualms and trepidation but are able to move forward anyway - no one but you and your mother care about the fear. Everyone else must react to your confident action.

Just lie and appear confident.

I suspect that in olden days the Inuit didn't have a lot of different options for dealing with disruptive people -- I bet people "fell off the ice" for all sorts of reasons. Including being found to have pushed someone off the ice...

It's stuff like this that makes me nervous about my injury. My entire walk stance has shifted since my ankle was crushed in a car. I am very much at a disadvantage now, as I can't physically run. I'm very much concerned that these "hawks" would pick that out.

I get it with homeless people. If I'm walking down the street, feeling tired, and cold and timid, a homeless person will often ask me for change. It never happens when I'm feeling assertive.

I take being asked for money as an early warning sign that I'm giving off victim bodylanguage.

Small gestures means hands flapping loose
Large gesture means arm swings
Small gesture means feet flopping about on each stride
Large gesture means legs swinging purposefully
Small gesture means head bobbing about
Large gesture means head held generally in one direction, letting eyes
gaze about.