When Sharon Patyk Komlos heard a man say, "Who did this? I'll take you to the hospital," she was frightened.
Several hours earlier, a man had used the identical words before taking her to his apartment and stabbing and raping her - the same stranger who had just shot and blinded her moments before.Komlos was driving to her Boca Raton, Fla., home that night in 1980, when a man driving a car pulled alongside, as if to pass, and shot her in the temple. The bullet severed her optic nerves and passed out the other side - leaving her blinded for life.
After she managed to stop her car on the side of the road, the assailant came to the window and asked, "Who did this? I'll take you to the hospital."
The man put her in the back of his car and pretended to take her to the hospital, but took her to his apartment, where he abused her for several hours.
She feigned death, and her assailant eventually left. Komlos found her way to the balcony where she screamed for help.
After hearing the same response from a passer-by that responded, she kept him talking long enough to determine that her assailant hadn't returned to torment her again. The second man took her to the hospital, where she recovered. Because of information she and the passer-by provided, Komlos' assailant was arrested and sentenced to 104 years in prison. He's not eligible for parole until 2091.
Since that time, Komlos has gone around the country delivering speeches to groups and appearing on such shows as "Donahue" and "Oprah."
Whenever she travels, she tries to stop in at small self-help groups to talk to people there. Monday, she visited with about 15 women at the YWCA's Women in Jeopardy support group for women who have been in abusive relationships.
She preached her simple doctrines of doing to others as you would have them do to you, of taking charge of your life by learning from the past, of keeping a sense of humor and of seeking happiness.
Before being shot, Komlos had green eyes. Now, her replacement eyes are blue. "I hope he gave me blue," she quipped.
"A sense of humor sure helps," she says. If she cried at each mistake or took offense at everything people said, she'd be an emotional wreck.
Komlos said she didn't have the typical grief process after the shooting. She skipped denial and anger and went "straight to acceptance.
She went through a divorce a few months after the shooting. She said her husband needed to look for happiness, and, if he couldn't find it with the family, he needed to look elsewhere.
Komlos said she has no reason to look back because her attacker already took several hours from her.
And blue-eyed Sharon Komlos will not allow him to take anymore.
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Women use technology to fight back
Speaker-counselor Sharon Patyk Komlos is in Salt Lake City to convince investors to help finance a new device that protects women from assailants.
The device, which the speaker showed to a small group of women Monday at the downtown YWCA, is essentially a miniature, key-chain version of police officers' stun guns.
The device, called a Myotron, sends a high-voltage, low-amperage electrical charge into an assailant, which scrambles his nervous impulses, knocking him unconscious long enough for a woman to flee and call police. The device, however, does not kill.
Fellow Florida resident Bill Gunby, the president of the American Federation Against Crime, helped design the device and recruited Komlos to talk to male investors who might not see the need for it.
The device may be on the market within 90 days.
It is a very painful device, Gunby said. In research, he was accidentally shocked four times himself and was knocked out.