A story of recovery from a terrifying attack
O'Donnell preparing for next month's marathon. She took up running as part of her recovery from injuries she suffered in her 2008 attack. (APRIL SAUL / Staff Photographer)
By Melissa Dribben, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
By Melissa Dribben, Inquirer Staff Writer
POSTED: October 13, 2013
For months after she came out of the coma, Beth O'Donnell had no recollection at all. Then bit by bit, the morning of Feb. 24, 2008, came back to her.
The man brandishing the butcher knife at her and her friend Kelsey Gaynier. The rape. His warning before leaving the room: "No funny business."
In time, O'Donnell would remember turning the lock behind him, throwing on her brown velour sweat suit, opening the window, and hearing the crash when the rapist broke down the door. The next few critical seconds, though, have mercifully retreated into some permanent hiding place in her brain.
She thinks she dived head first, but cannot be sure.
"There was only one way out," said Gaynier, who was forced to sit on the bed and watch the attack. As she recalls, O'Donnell climbed over the ledge, hung on, then, startled when the man burst back in, let go.
The rapist rushed over. Gaynier froze, certain that he would attack her next. Instead, he looked down at the sidewalk three stories below and saw O'Donnell's crumpled body.
He cursed her, Gaynier said, then ran.
"I thought she was dead."
It was going to be O'Donnell's last night in the apartment. After three years in the duplex at 220 South St., she wanted to live in a quieter section of the city.
Gaynier was going to help her move the next day. The women had been friends for a year since meeting at a Center City law firm where they both worked as paralegals.
The manager of North Bar, a pub next door to her building, had asked if he could hold a poker party in her apartment. O'Donnell did not know him well, but ran into him frequently when she walked her dog in the neighborhood.
"He had always seemed like a nice guy," she said, so she said yes.
After dinner, the two women went out for a few drinks. When they returned around midnight, the manager and his friends were still playing cards.
O'Donnell and Gaynier went upstairs and fell asleep. The next morning, O'Donnell got up to make coffee and found one of the manager's friends sitting on the living-room couch. She and Gaynier confronted him and asked him to leave.
Nothing about him seemed threatening. Seconds later, he appeared in the doorway with the knife.
"The whole thing was eerily quiet," Gaynier said.
The man was not particularly big. "But I'm 5-foot-1 and 100 pounds," Gaynier said. "Beth is an athlete, but she is about the same size as me. There was no way we were going to overpower him."
Speaking publicly for the first time, O'Donnell said she hopes her story will inspire other victims to reclaim their lives.
She has second-guessed herself, wondering if she could have done something to stop the attack.
"I thought, Why didn't I pick up the lamp and throw it at him?" she said. "But you don't know how you will react until you're in that situation."
There really was no good option, Gaynier said.
"When you're in a bedroom and someone holds a butcher knife to you, you don't scream. You're scared to death that he'll stab you to make you be quiet."
The call
The call came early that Sunday afternoon.
There had been an accident. O'Donnell was in critical condition at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
Joan and Tom O'Donnell threw some clothes and toothbrushes into a bag and were on the road within minutes.
The middle of their three daughters, Beth O'Donnell grew up in a leafy suburb in northern New Jersey. At 5, she already showed a talent for tennis. Despite the asthma that would periodically land her in the emergency room, she quickly rose through the competitive ranks.
At 11, she was featured in a local newspaper.
"I play better when I play against older girls," she told the reporter. "There's less pressure."
She won a full tennis scholarship to Rutgers University, where she studied psychology. After graduation, she worked in finance and taught tennis to adults, disabled children, and athletes in the Special Olympics.
In 2005, when she moved to Philadelphia, her parents worried about her safety.
"But she liked the bright lights," her mother said. "She wanted to be in the city."
When the O'Donnells arrived at the hospital, they were told there was no record of any patient by their daughter's name. She had no identification on her when she fell.
It took two panicked hours for them to learn that she had been admitted as "Bonnie Trauma."
Her doctors were not optimistic. Her fall had been broken by the sign outside the Chinese restaurant beneath her apartment. Nevertheless, she hit the concrete with what could have been lethal force. Twenty-two bones shattered. She fractured her skull, face, jaw, right clavicle, a toe, several ribs, and five vertebrae in her thoracic and cervical spine.
Of all her injuries, the swelling in her brain presented the greatest danger, so she had been put in a coma to give it time to recover.
Her parents were told in medicalese that she had sustained hemorrhagic contusions and a subdural hematoma.
In plain English, they understood what that meant.
If she survived, their daughter, once a nationally ranked tennis champion, might never speak or walk again.
For more than a month, friends and family kept vigil, waiting for her to open her eyes. Gaynier visited regularly, although it was painful.
Joan O'Donnell kept a diary.
On March 9, she wrote: "The waiting room is so sad. Mostly everyone is very private and alone with their personal pain. We have a silent bond. Any good news helps all of us."
At the end of March, when O'Donnell finally woke up, it was into a fog. She recognized her parents and her sisters, but could not speak or understand where she was or why she was in the hospital.
"You're a hero," her father told her.
She had no idea what he was talking about.
Learning to walk
Once she was stable, O'Donnell was transferred to a rehabilitation center, where she gradually learned how to walk again. In April, seven weeks after the attack, she returned to her parents' home and began outpatient therapy four days a week.
A high school friend who became a physical therapist offered to help.
"That was when I really found my confidence again," O'Donnell said during a recent interview in the home she now shares with her husband and two young sons.
The physical therapist encouraged her to pick up her tennis racket again and practice hitting balls against the wall. Then he persuaded her to get onto a treadmill.
"I had never been a runner," she said. "And I had to start slowly. But I loved it. It became my time away, without people taking care of me."
Her eyes well up. "I can focus on everything that happened to me when I'm running because that's when I feel strong."
Now 36, O'Donnell shows no sign of any injuries and seems at once shy and in control.
Her doctors' fears that the traumatic injury to her brain might cause mood swings and trigger bursts of anger have proved unfounded.
Other than a few lacy holes in her short-term memory, an intolerance for violent movies, and a low threshold for tears when she sees someone get hurt, O'Donnell has nearly fully recovered.
"It's miraculous that I'm alive," she said. "I beat every odd."
She has beaten more than a few.
On 9/11, she was working as a compliance officer at a commodities firm across the street from the World Trade Center. Before she ran and escaped the falling debris, she looked up to see people diving out of windows.
The choice they had made seemed unfathomable. Whether driven by fear, desperation, instinct, or bravery, no one could know. But with certain death closing in from behind, these people had opted for agency, leaping toward an infinitesimal chance of survival.
Seven years later, poised on the ledge, she had an inkling of what they might have been thinking.
"It was either deal with him or get out."
By the spring of 2009, O'Donnell's life was once again whole. She was married, newly pregnant with her first child, and had just started teaching tennis at a club not far from home.
Then on her way to work one morning, a driver blew through a stop sign at 70 miles an hour, T-boning into the passenger side of her Jeep Grand Cherokee and flipping it onto a lawn.
A neighbor saw the accident and called O'Donnell's father. When he arrived, through the flashing lights of fire trucks and police cars, he saw his daughter, strapped upside down in the driver's seat.
"They had to use the Jaws of Life to get her out," he said. "But she was unscathed."
Identifying the rapist
Gaynier had no trouble identifying the rapist when police showed her a gallery of suspects' photographs.
With help from the bar manager, local police and the FBI, he was found in New York. On March 3, detectives called the O'Donnells.
"They told us they had caught him and that he had a lawyer," Tom O'Donnell said.
While he and his wife were relieved that the man they referred to as "the creature" was not going to hurt anyone else, retribution was not their priority.
"There was nothing to be gained by focusing on him," he said. "You want to go forward."
On July 31, 2008, David Rosario, a 36-year-old from Brooklyn, pleaded guilty to rape, attempted rape, unlawful restraint, and possessing an instrument of crime. At his sentencing in October, he tried to withdraw the plea, claiming he was innocent.
He was sentenced to 121/2 to 25 years.
"It was the way a story should end," Tom O'Donnell said.
Coming back
Beth O'Donnell had always said she wanted to live in the suburbs, teach tennis, and raise a family, and now she is doing exactly that. She also teaches preschool and runs a tennis clinic for breast cancer patients and survivors.
Six months after the attack, O'Donnell and her parents visited Jefferson to thank the staff for taking such good care of her. She did not return to Philadelphia again until last fall, when she ran a half-marathon here.
Now, she is coming back again.
On Nov. 17, five years, six months, and 24 days since she jumped, O'Donnell will run the Philadelphia Marathon.
Just beyond the four-mile mark, she will pass the spot where the EMTs scraped her off the pavement.
She plans to stop long enough to raise her arms in victory.
mdribben@phillynews.com
215-854-2590
@ dribben@philly
No comments:
Post a Comment