Braille and Bravery: Cheryl Bess Has a Mighty Arsenal After Acid Attack

When Cheryl Bess was attacked with acid two years ago in the Mojave Desert, she instinctively wiped away her tears with the backs of her hands.

Cheryl, then 15, was left blind and virtually without a face. But because of the childhood habit of wiping away tears, the palms of her hands escaped the acid burns. Now, the once voracious reader is able again to devour books--with her fingertips.

Tracing Braille dots, Cheryl says now, has been her lifeline.

“I love it,” she said. “I just wish they had Teen Magazine in Braille.”

Soon Cheryl, whose plucky attitude inspired thousands of well-wishers worldwide to write letters and donate $400,000 to a trust fund in her name, will return to public high school.

‘I Can’t Wait’

“It’s going to be great. I can’t wait to be a senior,” Cheryl, now 17, said during an interview at a Garden Grove apartment she shares with her mother, Norma Bess. “It will be nice to be around kids my own age again.” She giggled. “And boys. “

As doctors have continued to surgically rebuild her face--structuring a new nose, eyelids and lips--Cheryl has forged personal triumphs: learning how to read Braille, use a cane, find her own way from the school bus to her doorstep, make her own bed, draw her own bath and even weave a pillow cover.

Physically, her mother and doctors say, the former San Bernardino High School honors student is prepared to re-enter the classroom. What prevents her return, said Norma Bess, is finding a local school with a special program for the blind. But between surgeries and therapy to strengthen her hands, she has studied science, algebra and geography with two goals in mind: graduating from high school and going to college.

She has come a long way since she was found wandering blindly in the desert like a “walking skeleton,” after she was abducted by a 65-year-old janitor who tried to rape her and then poured a gallon of drain cleaner over her head and left her for dead.

Since the attack on Oct. 24, 1984, Cheryl said she has learned: “Don’t ever take anything for granted. Now I hear the birds singing in the trees and the rainfall. I never paid any attention before.”

Early that October morning, Cheryl left a San Bernardino housing project where she and her mother lived. She set out to walk the usual three miles to school because her mother did not have the exact change required to ride the bus. Moments later, she recognized a maintenance worker at the housing project. As he had done a week earlier, the man offered her a ride to school. She accepted.

Threatened Her

But the maintenance man steered his van in the opposite direction and drove the sophomore to his home. Cheryl later told authorities that the man ordered her inside the house, but she refused and he forced her back into his van.

During the half-hour ride that followed, the house painter ordered her to stop crying and threatened to kill her before they arrived in Hesperia, a high desert community off Interstate 15.

The man took a plastic bottle marked with a “skull and crossbones” from the van and ordered her to a brushy spot off the road. She told of how he tried unsuccessfully to rape her before pouring the gallon jug of acid over her head. She said she played dead as the man sat on her stomach and watched her, acid dripping over her. Eventually, her assailant drove away.

Authorities arrested Jack Oscar King, now 67, hours after the assault, based on the victim’s description of her assailant and the van, coupled with information that King worked as a painter at the Besses’ apartment building.

During trial of her accused attacker in August, 1985, the blind, bandaged girl recounted the gruesome attack in a 1 1/2-hour testimony that left jurors wincing and wiping away tears.

After deliberating two hours, the San Bernardino County Superior Court jury convicted King, whom Cheryl never identified by name. He later was sentenced to 34 years in prison.

King’s appeal of the conviction has not yet been decided by the 4th District Court of Appeal. Should the verdict be overturned, defense attorneys and the state attorney general’s office said, Cheryl Bess would probably have to repeat her crucial testimony in a new trial.

Meanwhile, King remains in San Quentin state prison, manacled in an isolation cell, prison spokesman Dave Langerman said. King is kept isolated from other inmates for his own safety and at his own request, Langerman said.

‘I . . . Am . . . Bitter’

“I don’t care what they say about being bitter,” Norma Bess said recently. “Every time I have to put a dressing on her hand, or she has pain, I . . . am . . . bitter. When your child falls down and gets a bruise, you feel it too, as a mother. I want permission to punish him myself.”

Although she does not dwell on the subject, Cheryl doesn’t flinch when talking about “him” and what the attack has cost her. She never mentions such things as her hair, her ears, her nose or her eyelids--all of them eaten away by the sulfuric acid. Nor does she bring up the flesh-colored bandage she must wear like an open-faced hood to prevent scar tissue from growing.

“I can’t see, of course, and I’ve lost my ability to move around,” Cheryl said. “I guess what I’ve really lost is my independence, which was hard to get used to.” She laughed softly and then shook her head. “And of course, I’ve lost some dreams now.”

One dream was to be an obstetrician, a career she talked about even in the months immediately after she was blinded and disfigured.

“We’ve had to be realistic,” Norma Bess said.

“A doctor has to be able to see what’s wrong with a patient,” Cheryl concedes, adjusting the mirrored sunglasses she is rarely without. “So maybe I’ll be a sort of doctor, a psychologist. . . . I want to give something back to the world.”

‘Extremely Bright’

At the Anaheim chapter of the Braille Institute of America, where Cheryl graduated last April, the school’s chief of programming doesn’t doubt that the former student will succeed.

“If anybody can, she will,” Sheila Daily, the school’s student training coordinator, said this week about Cheryl, the institute’s youngest graduate.

“She’s an extremely bright girl, a very quick learner. She was a pleasure to have in class because she likes to learn. She’s really a remarkable reader,” Daily said. “She had her fingers reading Braille in almost no time.”

Cheryl also “served as a very positive influence on the rest of our students,” Daily said. “She was a positive role model. . . . She learned a lot from them too.”

Cheryl still gets letters from around the world. Mrs. E. Brown of Ireland writes Cheryl every month. And the San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies union, which manages the Cheryl Bess Trust Fund, still receives regular donations from its members.

Since graduating from the institute, Cheryl has been absorbed in catching up with her studies so she can return to school. So for several hours a day, mother and daughter face each other at the kitchen table as teacher and student. They hope she’ll soon be enrolled in a public high school, although they haven’t decided yet which one.

In the meantime, Norma uses Scholastic Aptitude Test manuals and textbooks to drill Cheryl in such subjects as literature, geography, science, American history and algebra. (One Braille textbook fills 18 volumes.)

During a recent session, Cheryl complained that her mother wasn’t giving her enough time or enough hints to answer the questions.

“I’m not supposed to give you a chance, Cheryl,” Norma replied firmly. “This is not Trivial Pursuit. You have a lot to learn, and if you don’t learn it today, you’ll learn it tomorrow. Because I will teach you.”

Cheryl pleaded to sit on the couch instead of at the kitchen table.

‘Like Real Life’

“No,” Norma said. “That’s not how it goes in school. Let’s do this like real life.”

Every morning, the mother said, they get up, get dressed and sit at the table. There is no lounging in pajamas. The only time Cheryl is allowed to study in bed is if she has spent the day at the hospital for physical therapy.

“I’m basically very pleased with the progress of the reconstruction and how everything is functioning,” said Dr. Bruce Achauer, the plastic surgeon who has literally given Cheryl a new face. “We’ve got her nose in place, and we’re shaping it, and she has eyelids on there that actually open and close. Her hands are working very well. . . . Her attitude and outlook is fantastic.”

Transplant Possible

Achauer said the possibility of giving Cheryl a cornea transplant in an attempt to restore partial vision in her right eye--the left is “not salvageable”--has been the one “major disappointment so far.” But he said that possibility has not been abandoned.

It is the one dream Cheryl clings to most fiercely.

“I’m hoping I can see someday, but I’ve got to go on with my life now,” she said. “I can see colors some, and light. I maybe can’t see, but at least I can see light. I often think if I didn’t have light, I’d be lost. Light is comforting to me; it’s like, if I see the light, I exist. I have the hope I may be able to see more one day.

“It’d be nice to be able to go to the thrift store like we used to before all this and just buy a (used) dime novel,” she said softly. “That’s the thing. I’d like to be able to just sit under a tree and read a book. Braille takes a lot more work.”