Stabbed teacher talks about healing and going back

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www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=287550&src=1

Stabbed teacher talks about healing and going back to work
By Kerry Lester | Daily Herald 4/19/2009

Carolyn Gilbert survived a violent attack at the hands of a student 15 months ago. But she has refused to let it derail her life. This is her story.

Gilbert, an Elgin High School teacher, had to heal from the attack - physically and emotionally - for the sake of her two teenage daughters. And the students who awaited her return. With her attacker behind bars, Gilbert is now willing to share her ordeal publicly, if only to thank the colleagues who saved her and helped see her through her recovery.

First of three parts

Carolyn Gilbert should have been grading the dozens of first semester exams she'd just finished giving.

Or heading home to Bloomingdale to begin a three-day weekend with Elizabeth and Caitlin, her two teenage daughters.

Instead, on Friday, Jan. 18, 2008, she found herself sitting in a Sherman Hospital bed, trying to wrap her mind around the horrific sequence of events that had unfolded hours before.

A little after 11 a.m., the family and consumer science teacher at Elgin High had just finished giving her last exam when 16-year-old Angel Facio walked in, asking to wait until the bus came.

Gilbert had taught Facio the year before as a freshman in child development.

He had been an average student. Friendly. Gilbert knew she was one of his favorite teachers.

Facio had come to her classroom at the same time the day before but had left after Gilbert told him that she had to go and run some tests through a grading machine.

This time, she let him wait, as she began to file some papers.

After a few minutes, Facio ran up from behind her, threw a coat over her head and pulled her to the floor. He began stabbing her over and over again - in the head, the neck and the eye - with a serrated kitchen knife.

Gilbert screamed, loud enough for Mike Gannon, the math and computer science teacher in the next room, to hear her through the cinder block wall.

The normally mild-mannered teacher ran in and shouted, "You get off her!"

Facio, weighing close to 200 pounds, immediately obeyed, dropping the knife to the floor.

Gannon ordered the boy to sit in a classroom desk and not move. He called for help, as Gilbert pulled herself up and got out of the classroom and into the hallway.

"I didn't feel a thing until I got out of there," Gilbert said. "I didn't feel my shoulder from where he slammed me into the floor. It was just my eye. I've always been protective of my eyes. I've worn glasses, contacts, everything since the second grade."

Gilbert was sent by ambulance, alone, to Sherman Hospital in Elgin.

She knew she was covered in blood from the stab wounds, but she couldn't see. With one eye seriously injured, the other had closed up as her body tried to protect it, doctors told her.

As doctors worked on Gilbert, fellow teachers and staff kept vigil at the hospital, shooing away reporters. Several Elgin police officers were stationed outside her room.

Her daughters were sent to the hospital after they got home from school.

"I told everyone, 'Don't let them see me like this,'" said the 51-year-old single mom. "By the time they came over they had cleaned me up, cut my clothes off, put my gown on."

She found herself exhausted from the pain medication. The stitches in the back of her head were uncomfortable.

Elizabeth, then a Lake Park High School senior, took charge of calling family members from the hospital and reading the fine print on hospital forms.

Despite the tremendous pain she was experiencing, "I didn't pass out," Gilbert said. "I just told them to give me something, knock me out. Shoot me, do something."

Initially, Gilbert said, what upset her the most was "knowing that I knew Angel liked me ... I thought maybe this is an initiation to a gang, but then I thought, 'Well, no, he's not a gang kid. That can't be it.' But see, it was very hard because I wanted to know why."

In a few hours, Gilbert would be moved to the University of Illinois Medical Center's Ear and Eye Infirmary in Chicago. There, she would go through several painful surgeries to try to save her eye and begin a difficult emotional healing process.

Day 2: The recovery

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www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=287549&src=1

Teacher who saved her wasn't supposed to have been there
By Kerry Lester | Daily Herald 4/19/2009

He shouldn't have been there.

Mike Gannon, a 21-year Elgin High teaching veteran, was letting students finish up a computer programming exam a little after 11 a.m. Jan. 18, 2008, several minutes after they were supposed to hand in their papers.

"If I'd left when the bell rang, I wouldn't have been there at all," he says of interrupting Angel Facio's attack on Carolyn Gilbert.

"But the kids were dawdling about getting their work in, and I'm sort of softhearted. I said, 'OK, I'll sit here and do some paperwork.'"

That's when he heard the scream that made his stomach lurch.

"If you have kids, you know the difference when they just cry and when they're hurt," Gannon, of Belvidere, said. "I knew something was wrong."

Gannon told his students to stay put, and he went into the hallway to see what was going on. No one was there.

He heard another scream and realized it was coming from the room next door - Carolyn Gilbert's classroom.

Entering the room, it wasn't immediately clear who the 16-year-old student was attacking, having pinned his victim to the ground.

Gannon's first action was to get Facio to drop his knife and get off the woman.

He backed Facio into a desk in the classroom and shouted at him not to move.

As he did so, the woman grabbed hold of him for support, pulling herself up and out of the room. He then realized it was Gilbert.

"The whole thing was a complete surprise. One surprise after another to my senses," he said.

After securing Facio, Gannon did as he'd been trained, hitting the room's red emergency button and calling the front office through the intercom.

As he stepped out into the hallway to check on Gilbert, he saw Lynn Kronvold, a member of Gilbert's department, running down the hall to help. Assistant Principal Alan Flota, a dean's assistant, and the school's police liaison officer also arrived within seconds.

Gannon watched the officer handcuff Facio and take him away. Gilbert was taken to Sherman Hospital.

"My part of it at that point was done," Gannon said.

Throughout the ordeal, Gannon said he was never afraid that Facio would pick up the knife and begin attacking him, too. "These are children. No matter how big they get, they just think and act like children. Teachers, we're all trained, to take command of a classroom. To me that's not extraordinary. We're all used to handling situations."

What did scare him was the thought of what could have been.

Friday was the only day of first semester exams when he was in that classroom at that hour.

For months after the attack, Gannon had trouble sleeping, frequently waking up from nightmares in which he arrived too late.

"The idea that he could have killed her just haunts me," he said.

Elgin Area School District U-46 Safety Coordinator John Heiderscheidt came to talk to Gannon, explaining the post-traumatic stress that he'd feel.

"Once I knew that it was going to get better, that helped," he said. "Each day I face kids, I don't think about it anymore. It's only in a couple of weak moments when it's late and I'm tired it sort of creeps up on me."