Victim, Police Search in Vain for a Motive in Shooting : Crime: Gunman, companion escape. Immigrant is partially paralyzed by gunshot and keeps asking himself, ‘Why did they look for me?’

A man leaving a restaurant with a carry-out order was shot in the back Wednesday night by one of two men in ski masks who--reportedly without saying anything--left him paralyzed from the waist down.

The assailants who shot Boguslaw Olszak, 31, ran into an apartment complex behind Elida’s Mexican Restaurant on Beach Boulevard and escaped, Sgt. Terry Branum said.

Olszak moved here from Poland five years ago for “a better life” and cannot speak English well, said his girlfriend, who did not want to be identified for fear of the attackers. Olszak and she were both confused about why he was shot.

“We’re both alone here” without family, the girlfriend, a native of Ecuador, said in the lobby of UCI Medical Center in Orange. “It’s pretty sad what’s happened to us, and we didn’t do anything.”

Olszak remained in stable condition at the hospital.

They had just come home from work Wednesday, he in construction and she in nursing, and he offered to go pick up food from the restaurant, a block and a half from her house, she said.

She became worried when he was not home by 8:30 p.m., but figured that he also might have stopped off to buy groceries.

Worry turned to panic at 11 p.m. when there was still no sign of the man she had been dating for five years, and she decided to drive to the restaurant.

“I couldn’t believe it was happening and kept hoping it was a dream,” she said of not knowing his whereabouts.

When she got to the restaurant, it was closed--but Olszak’s car was still in the parking lot. She called the Buena Park Police Department, where she learned what had had happened.

She stayed at UCI Medical Center until 3:30 a.m. Thursday and returned there seven hours later.

Olszak told her that he was walking to his car when he saw two men in ski masks following him, the Buena Park woman said. He started running and then felt a sharp pain in his back.

Restaurant employees heard the shot and called authorities, police said. The restaurant’s manager, declining to identify herself, said Thursday that she did not see the assailants and did not know why the shooting occurred.

Police are also baffled.

“We don’t have any theories as to why this happened,” Branum said.

Olszak said the two attackers never said anything, according to police and his girlfriend, who insisted that he had not been in any fights.

“He keeps asking even now, ‘Why did they shoot me, why did they look for me?’ ” the woman said.

Olszak, who was very active and played tennis, “prefers to die than be paralyzed,” she said.

He does not want his family in Poland to know about the shooting, she said. Olszak had come here from the then-communist country as a political refugee with two friends from school.

“He didn’t like it there with too much pressure and the politicians,” the woman said.