Slow Healing Random Crimes Can Shatter Lives In An Instant, Then Leave Survivors Facing Years Of Anguish

Even weathered detectives, who no longer believed they could be affected, admit the violence they have seen this year puts them on edge.

They blame at least some of their uneasiness on the victims they’ve met and helped.

More than ever, crime seemed to shake the lives of ordinary folks.

In the Spokane of 1995, the 64-year-old grandmother living next door is a carjacking victim. The mason walking home with his mother is savagely beaten.

“It’s not just bad guys offing bad guys anymore,” said Lt. Jerry Oien, who oversees major crime investigations for the Spokane Police Department. “It’s true, honest-to-goodness people getting picked out of the crowd, becoming the next victim, getting something they don’t deserve. That’s what’s so upsetting, and it’s happening a lot more now.”

While their stories have faded from public view, the victims are still recovering, still healing.

Many want to move on, forget. Others remain angry. A few think they will always be afraid.

Most agree the crimes made them stronger. The problems they worried about before don’t seem unmanageable now. They’ve learned to look ahead, set goals and watch out for trouble.

They also remember to count their blessings and treasure their time with loved ones. They know how quickly it all can go.

One woman whose son was killed this year uses the word “survivor” to describe herself.

“‘Victim’ is too needy, too pitiful,” the woman says. “I believe things happen for a reason, even if you don’t ever understand. You have to survive. And learn.”

Donna Fischer, carjack victim

The half-moon scar on her face is a burning reminder of the attack she’s trying to forget.

When Donna Fischer looks at the 3-inch engraving on her cheek, she curses the man who wrapped his hands around her neck in a north Spokane parking lot and hissed, “I’m going to kill you.”

“I get angry and then I get scared,” said Fischer, 64. “I don’t like being by myself, especially when it’s dark outside. Sometimes, I have bad dreams.”

Fischer, pummeled by a carjacker Sept. 29 behind Montgomery Ward on North Division, could be anybody’s grandmother.

The retired hospital mailroom worker spends her days doing needlework, painting, and lately, making fancy holiday sweat shirts.

Photographs of four children and several grandchildren cover the walls and shelves of her Mead home.

She talks to her yapping dog and pads around the house in slippers, moving from one project to the next. She tries to stay busy until her husband gets home from work.

“I usually wait for him if I need to go somewhere,” she said. “I’m getting better, though. I’m getting out more.”

Since the attack, Fischer said she second-guesses everything - where she parks her car, who’s walking next to her, what she’d do if someone gets too close.

After all, the beating happened in broad daylight outside a busy mall. She never saw her attacker until he was all over her. He left her bloodied on the pavement and sped away in her car.

“I never had anything like this happen to me,” said Fischer, who had lived safely in Spokane for 33 years before being attacked. “I never thought it could, not here. You never think you’re so vulnerable.”

When her car was found and returned, Fischer told her husband to sell it.

She also had the locks changed on the house and canceled her credit cards and bank accounts because her attacker got away with her purse. She worried for a while that he’d come back for her. Police never made an arrest.

Then the anger seeped in, Fischer said, and she decided to keep living.

“I have to move on,” she said, touching the scar that’s still a little sore. “What happened to me shouldn’t have happened. It’s done enough damage. I can’t let it rule my life.”

Rea Holbrook, a mother alone

As Rea Holbrook shuffles through a pile of pictures of her dead son Kory, the man who killed him calls.

“Can you call back in like an hour?” Holbrook asks Gavin Ritzler, 26, her boyfriend who is being held at the Spokane County Jail on murder charges.

She hangs up and returns to the memories - Ritzler holding a grinning Kory, the toddler putting on his socks, all three hugging at a park.

Ritzler was arrested Aug. 18, after he slammed 2-year-old Kory on the floor of their North Side apartment.

Medics tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the boy, who died of head injuries.

A diabetic, Ritzler said the assault happened when his blood sugar level dropped while he baby-sat Kory. The former fitness trainer said he had a seizure, causing him to be confused and lose control of his movements.

Holbrook believes him. She’s seen what happens to her boyfriend when he needs to eat. Sometimes, the seizures get so bad she has to spoonfeed Ritzler like a baby, she said.

“There’s no way he meant to hurt Kory,” Holbrook said. “Gavin used to get mad at me if I punished him. He never laid a hand on Kory.”

Since Kory was 2 weeks old, Ritzler was part of her family, Holbrook said. While the boy’s real father left her when she got pregnant, Ritzler helped raise the baby like he was his own son.

Holbrook said detectives investigating the case don’t understand diabetes. They believe Ritzler had a responsibility to take care of his disease, to prevent something like this from happening.

“It isn’t a completely controllable disease,” she said.

Despite the everything-is-fine front she puts on, the loss she feels is real, Holbrook said. She goes to school full time and works nearly every night - a schedule she keeps as a distraction, so she doesn’t break down.

“I’m not always as OK as I let on,” said Holbrook, who is studying physical therapy. “I have my days.”

Still, Holbrook will never use the word “victim” to describe herself.

She’s simply trying to deal with the death of her son, a tragedy she believes is misunderstood. Ritzler is not some monster who beat Kory to death, she said, although she admits he needs help handling the diabetes.

She wants Ritzler to get out of jail and get that help. She doubts they have a future together, though. Having a baby with Ritzler is out of the question, she said.

“I may understand what happened and why it happened, but I’m still grieving,” Holbrook said. “Everybody keeps saying what side I’m on, that I’m on Gavin’s or whatever. But I don’t want to take sides. I’m on Kory’s side.”

Ruth Ross, up in flames

Ruth Ross lost her house, two sons and nearly a daughter, yet she is not bitter.

Instead, the 74-year-old woman focuses on what she has left and what the future will bring.

Ross now sandwiches doctors’ appointments around crocheting afghans, talking on the telephone and watching television, all hobbies she has enjoyed for many years.

She guides her walker with ease through the single-story home she shares with her daughter and son-in-law, eager to show off her new room.

“I bought this as a Christmas present for myself,” she said proudly sitting down in a white wicker chair positioned just so in the corner.

A large-buttoned, amplified telephone rests on a matching end table next to the chair. A navy, red and white afghan - a work in progress - covers a laundry basket. A television sits in the opposite corner.

That simple life appeared gone three months ago.

Angered because he feared his siblings were taking their mother from him, Richard Ross shot his brother, Bob, and sister, Barbara Janosky, before setting fire to the family home of more than 30 years. Ruth Ross was also injured when she fell while fleeing the gunfire.

Bob Ross died from his injuries, while Janosky has spent the last three months in the hospital and a rehabilitation center recovering from hers. Richard Ross died in the fire.

Pictures of all of her children, including one of Richard Ross dressed sharply in a sport coat and tie, are spread around her room.

“I forgive Richard and I still love him,” said Ruth Ross, who suffered total hearing loss in her right ear and partial loss in her left ear when her son fired the gun over her right shoulder. “I understand why it all happened.”

When Becky Toombs and her husband, Larry, moved to the Valley to help take care of her mother, they brought with them a thriving ceramic business they hope to reopen next to their home by the end of January.

Ross is anxiously awaiting its opening. She has already claimed a job shredding papers and hopes to busy herself with other duties.

“Otherwise I thought my life was over,” Ross said. “I hate to sit and do nothing.”

Until the business opens, Ross is preparing for Christmas. She recently took her first shopping trip in five years and is in charge of the refreshments for a Christmas Day gathering.

She will be surrounded by much of her family, including Janosky, who left St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute on Friday. Linda Ross, Bob’s widow, will also join them.

“I’m back to my same old same old,” said Ruth Ross.

Janice Everhart, hit by bike

Janice Everhart starts to cry when she thinks of the last rose she smelled.

She’ll never again smell a flower or taste her favorite chocolate. And in her left ear, she hears a constant buzz she compares to “a herd of mosquitoes.”

“Really, it’s as if part of my body died,” she said of her lost senses.

Everhart, 49, an advertising executive for The Spokesman-Review, was walking out of the Great Western Building downtown on Riverside Avenue last April when a 17-year-old who was riding his bike illegally on the sidewalk ran into her.

Her head smacked the pavement. Witnesses told police she tried to get up but finally was taken to a hospital, where she was in a coma for three weeks.

The 17-year-old was never charged, police said. The highest penalty he faces is a misdemeanor, said Dick Cottam, a police spokesman.

“I’d just started getting my life together,” Everhart said. “And then this happens and turns my life upside down.”

Before the coma, Everhart was working, getting ready to see her daughter graduate from college and beginning to write a couple of novels.

Since waking from the coma, she has learned to walk with crutches, see clearly with special glasses to alleviate double vision, and even exercise during 15-minute sessions on the treadmill in her living room.

Everhart spoke of when she was “normal,” and expresses embarrassment about using crutches and needing to shower sitting down.

Even walking outside to get her newspaper one snowy day turned into an ordeal when she fell.

“I got so upset. I thought the neighbors were probably watching,” said Everhart, who did make her way inside with the newspaper.

She looked at her tracks in the snow and became sadder.

“I saw my footprints. It was my two feet and the two cane marks. And then a big butt print in the snow by the mailbox,” she said.

Everhart’s goals are to relearn to walk, drive and then return to work.

For strength, Everhart often remembers a favorite saying of her British mother: “On the brink of your despair, your character is built.”

John Hintz, mugging victim

On the night before he was to give his oldest daughter a party for her ninth birthday, John Hintz’s plans suddenly changed.

Hintz was brutally attacked. He never threw the party. Instead, he was in a coma.

But next year, he’s promised his daughter a double party.

His family is thrilled he’s alive to make the promise.

The 35-year-old cement mason was walking with his mother from a bowling alley when he was attacked and robbed by four teens only two blocks from his home on the night of Oct. 20. All four have been arrested.

After one teen hit him in the head, Hintz hit the ground with a heavy thud.

Jackie Ogle thought her son was dead and ran to a nearby home for help.

Hintz was in a coma for 13 days after the attack near Nevada and Courtland.

“I was a little slow at the beginning. I called her a different name at first,” he said of his girlfriend. “I think I’m doing a little better now.”

In the hospital, his long hair was cut off, although he didn’t realize that for a while.

“I thought it was cute when he was combing the back of his hair and said, ‘Honey, didn’t I have a ponytail?’ ” said girlfriend Karen Kendall. “He’s compensated by growing a beard.”

On Thanksgiving Day, Hintz was released from the hospital and now undergoes daily rehabilitation.

He’s disappointed he can’t return to work immediately, but his rehabilitation is geared toward preparing him for his job.

In one exercise, Hintz carried buckets containing 40-pound weights around St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Center Institute. “I thought, ‘Damn, my hands hurt,”’ he said.

Hintz is amazed at the teens he sees in rehabilitation who have suffered their head injuries from assaults. “You hear some weird stories down there,” he said.

Perhaps because he doesn’t remember the attack, Hintz isn’t scared to walk the streets of his neighborhood.

Maybe he should be, said Kendall, who grew up in the area.

“When I was a kid we’d walk to Riverside and go cruising and walk back,” she said. “Now, you’re afraid to walk out your door.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 photos (2 color)

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Reporters Stories by Bonnie Harris, Gita Sitaramiah and Brian Coddington.