Victims Are Fighting to Become Survivors

Start with a basic law of nature: The predator overpowers the prey. The roles here are clearly defined, victor and victim, strong and weak. It is a tired script. It has been done to death.

And it is never as simple as that.

A chameleon might change color and is spared. An opossum plays dead, and its bored attacker moves on. A skunk could take a less subtle route. Animals do whatever works to survive.

Human beings in the concrete jungle caught on to this long ago. We arm ourselves, we get tough. An American President tries the act himself. “Make my day!” he smirks, and many applaud. It is mantra to the masses.

We don’t want to be prey, we want to be Clint.

Nurse Joan Lepman, 37 years old, somebody who looks just like anybody else, made a big splash in the newspaper the other day. She was held up at gunpoint in a parking lot of a La Habra mall. Two punks wanted her truck.

Normally, this kind of thing would be buried deep inside the paper, probably as a brief. In the jaded world of everyday violence, it was a rather ho-hum crime.

Except Joan Lepman fought back, and she won. The punks ran, empty-handed, and they were caught.

“It was all pretty amazing,” Lepman said. “If I had cooperated, I still could have gotten shot. Or I could have gotten shot trying to protect myself. I decided to do the latter.”

Reading those words, I could almost hear the chorus of “Amens” from others reading them too. I felt like yelling it myself. Then, of course, the story included the usual disclaimer from the forces of the law, something to the effect of, “Please, don’t try this yourself at home.”

And then I had to pause. My mind wandered to that basic law of nature about the predator and the prey, the weak and the strong. The weakest, of course, might be armed, so then the usual laws get turned upside down.

But the will to survive is the most basic of all, even among those sized up as prey. Women, children, the old and disabled, these are the ones not expected to fight back. It is big news when they do.

“I just saved myself,” Joan Lepman said. The instinct to fight may well have saved her life.

Now I am in San Clemente, in the home of a woman I’ll call Tricia, 40 years old. She is a part-time computer instructor, a full-time mother, active in the PTA. She is 5 foot 4 and weighs 108 pounds.

Even the jaded cannot consider the crime that happened here last July a ho-hum affair. It too, was reported in the newspaper, on the local front page, with only the name of the assailant, one James H. Boliek.

Boliek, 27, once part of a crew that painted Tricia’s home, is dead. He killed himself with a shotgun moments after terrorizing Tricia and her husband in their home.

Boliek entered Tricia’s house through the unlocked bedroom door downstairs, surprising her and her husband as they sat at the kitchen table at 11:30 at night. The couple’s children, 3, 5 and 19 years old, were not at home. It was only the second time ever that the younger ones had spent the night out.

“It was divine intervention,” Tricia says.

Boliek ripped the phone from the wall, tied up Tricia’s husband with the cord, and then raped his wife. Boliek was holding a shotgun and had a pistol tucked in his pocket. A black bag he brought contained lots of ammo and knives.

When Tricia thought that Boliek was “done,” she thanked him. She had gone somewhere deep inside herself, disconnected from the horror she was living, like something on the screen. She assumed the assailant would just leave.

“I said, ‘Thank you very much for leaving us in peace,’ ” Tricia says. “And he said, ‘Who says I’m going anywhere? The first time was to warm you up. The second time is to hurt you.’ ”

It was then, Tricia says, that something just clicked . She pulled herself up from the floor, ignoring Boliek’s warnings, and she started to run. Then as Boliek was aiming the shotgun at her back, Tricia stopped and turned to face him head on.

She stood in a “horse stance,” her knees apart and bent, two fists at her side. It is a basic posture that she had just learned in a martial-arts class, the one she had enrolled in “under the umbrella of motherhood” so that she could coach her young son.

Tricia remembers telling her instructor that she didn’t want to learn how to fight. She was enjoying the movement, the workout. It was art.

“It was a reflex action,” Tricia says of her stance that night. “It saved us.”

Boliek, startled by Tricia’s action, stared. Then he moved the shotgun slightly, leaving his groin exposed. Tricia delivered a swift kick. Boliek buckled, and Tricia ran, hitting the electric garage door opener as she bolted down the stairs, out the garage and to safety in a neighbor’s home.

Now Tricia’s husband, kept still by Boliek’s threats, was able to free himself. He jumped at Boliek from the stair landing leading to the garage, where Boliek was aiming his shotgun at Tricia as she ran.

The two men struggled. Boliek shot Tricia’s husband at point blank range. He survived, but his shoulder was virtually blown to bits. Police caught up with Boliek a few minutes later as he was walking on a nearby street. He ran onto a garage patio, sat down on a lawn chair, and fatally shot himself between the legs.

“It was survival,” Tricia says of that night. “Everything I was doing, I was doing on instinct. When it meant accommodating him, giving up my body, I did that. When the rape wasn’t enough, then I reacted instinctively to that . . . . No! I knew he planned to kill us then.”

Tricia still enjoys martial arts, even though her son has long dropped out. She no longer minds the instructor’s references to “your attacker” or “your enemy,” which so unsettled her before. Tricia says she is different now.

“I don’t feel that I’m naive any longer,” she says. “I used to think I could settle any encounter peacefully. I no longer think that. In some instances, you need to fight.”

Victim is a loaded word. It can wound the mind, beat down the soul, even as it tries to soothe. Survivor, now, is the preferred term. It is not a boast, it does not mean that you would like to try it again. It means, simply, that you live.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.