Listen: The Power In Fear, Part 5

Harnessing that power means being able to think straight, says one.

"If you panic and allow yourself to get out of control, you're giving that person that much more power," the Cherokee County woman says.

It's simply being gutsy, according to another.

"You've gotta be," the DeKalb County woman says. "If you don't stand up for yourself, won't nobody stand up for you."

Asking to be identified only by the name "Theresa," the Snapfinger Road-area resident was at home, napping, when four would-be burglars broke into her home in late January.

She raced to dial 911, then grabbed a knife and confronted the home invader climbing her stairs.

"When he came up the steps, I came at him," Theresa said. "And I wasn't going to back back. I was going to keep going and fight for my life."

With police quickly arriving, the crooks sped away, crashing into a mailbox. Trying to make a run for it on foot, three of them were caught within minutes.

A Story Of Survival

39-year-old Verna Sue White survived a vicious beating and rape in her Cherokee County home in 2006. Fifteen months after the assault, she talks to a reporter and feels comfortable using her own name. WSB's policy is not to release the identities of sexual assault victims, but White allows her real name to be used here.

The man who attacked her is someone she'd known since high school. She says though he did monstrous things that night, he was not a monster. She says Gerald Lee, whom she remembers as popular and outgoing, was in the grip of a ruthless methamphetamine addiction.

White's intuition--a feeling that something wasn't right--nagged her for days before the November 5 assault. An encounter she and Lee had had Halloween night made her so uncomfortable, she says, that she gave coworkers at the salon where she styled hair his name "in case something happens to me."

The night the "something" happened, she was making tea. Her seven-year-old daughter was building a bear on an Internet site, when she heard the glass in her back door being smashed in. A towel-covered hand reached inside, turned the doorknob, and she recognized Lee--shirtless and wearing a mask--by his voice.

He shoved her down and raped her.

Her daughter burrowed in the closet, the methamphetamine-fueled brutality against White lasted nearly an hour.

"He raped me several times, and I told him I wasn't going to take it anymore," says White. He put his gun to her head, "and it jammed," White remembers. "By the grace of God, it jammed. That's when he got angry, and he come charging at me and hit me in the forehead with the butt of the gun."

Covered in blood, having lost control of her bowels, White made her peace with death. Her life had been incredibly tough anyway, she was thinking. Maybe it was time for her to go.

"I was like, Lord, please, if it's my time, I'm ready to go but please don't let nothing happen to my baby," White says.

White knows angels were with her that night. Her faith in God, always a part of her life even through brushes with the law and her own drug use, is even stronger now. She says it's because at that moment she felt comforted, held. She heard a voice saying, "Stay calm. Be still. He's fixing to mess up and this is what you're going to do."

Curled in a ball, maybe she was praying aloud without realizing, because then it was as if he had heard her and he strode back into the bedroom.

"And that's when he says, 'Verna, what's the matter, you feel like you're dying? Call your daughter out here so I can have my way with her before I finish this job.' And at that time I felt such a rage in me," White says. "I felt like I wanted to get up then and just go charging at him and attack him at that time, but I couldn't move. I literally couldn't move."

She said nothing.

A plan played itself out in her mind.

"I was going to get away, grab that gun, run for the kitchen and grab a butcher knife," she recounts.

Finding The Power In Fear

White was beaten, numb, and so battered physically and emotionally she was ready to exchange her own life for her daughter's. When asked where she got the strength to fight back, she pauses.

"Fear," White says matter-of-factly. "Out of fear for my daughter, what he was capable of doing to her...and the fact of knowing that it was a matter of life or death for her."

Lee turned toward the bathroom and White grabbed his gun, racing to hide it as she ran for the kitchen. She knew he would follow. She snatched the butcher knife and as he rounded the corner, he ran into the blade. Like it was a scene in a horror movie, the confrontation didn't end there.

They fought. He went outside and grabbed a lawn chair, shoving her with it, knocking her off balance. He threw the tea on the stove on her. They parried. He ran out the back door, which she locked. As she arrived at the front door, he was shoving his way in. They tussled more. He punched through a window; she tried stabbing his hands.

He managed to undo the top of the window and fall in on top of her.

"Oh my God, he's fixing to get this knife from me," White prayed. The knife sliced a deep gash in her palm. "Take me, but spare my daughter."

"You still believe in your God?" he asked.

"Yes, I do," White says.

"Where's he at now?" he asked.

"He's right here with me," she replied, and the way she recalls it, something lifted him off of her at that moment.

"I seen a haze around him and we had eye contact just for a second. He had that look of fear in his eyes...and I rolled over on my back, held the knife just like this--" she motions that the blade was held out in front of her--"and it was like someone just dropped him," White says, clapping her hands together once loudly to show the sudden force. "Right on top of the knife. He got up, he staggered off. He collapsed on the kitchen floor and he started flopping around, and I stabbed him in the back a couple more times."

Quivering, she ran to check on her daughter, hiding in the bathtub. Trying to hide her own nudity, she instructed the girl to hide under her bed and not to answer to anyone's voice unless it was Mommy or the police.

She found the battery to her cordless phone, which had fallen out when her attacker smashed her in the head with it earlier. She called 911. The last thing she remembers that night was being loaded onto a helicopter and hearing the police say the man who'd raped her was dead.

"I didn't know if I'd live to see the next day, but I knew my baby girl was okay and that's all that mattered," she says softly.

White says though she did what she had to do, she feels remorse that someone died.

"There's no 'what you should do,'" says renowned security consultant Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift Of Fear. "There's following your intuition, which will always be different. There's no prescription. I'm not going to be there with you. You'll know what's right.

"And sometimes, it's comply, do what the guy says. And sometimes, it's fight. And sometimes, it's comply until you fight. Sometimes it's fight and try it and then comply later. But the point is, you've got the way. You've got the method if you believe you've got the method...and you're a lot more dangerous than he is because he doesn't know what you might do. He knows what his resources are; he doesn't know what you might do," says de Becker.

White says as hard as it might be, do your best to keep thinking clearly. She says otherwise, you're giving your attacker too much power, too much control.

Today, her scars are healed, and so is the injured index finger doctors thought they might have to amputate. She has gone back to work, cutting hair at a salon, and she and her daughter have regular visits to a therapist. Her relationship with her three children has grown stronger, she says.

"All in all, it's brought us closer together," says White. "I think they realize how much I do love them and really what I'm capable of doing when it comes down to protecting them."

While police say they recommend that you call 911 and either hide or escape through another door when someone breaks into your home, Theresa said the decision to do what she did came to her easily.

"I just told him I wasn't fixing to die today, which I wasn't," she said.

Friday, 29 February 2008

E-mail Veronica Waters