Shooting Victim Calls Her Ordeal Nudge ‘to Get Busy’

Her mouth wired shut with metal bands, a purple cast weighing down her arm, Patti Salot still put a gold earring over the bandages covering the wounds where bullets tore through her face 10 days ago.

Salot, the 48-year-old driver Mark Richard Hilbun allegedly shot five times on May 6 after a murder spree, said it was the least she could do.

“I’m really lucky to be alive,” Salot said as she sat in her cramped trailer with her husband and the two dogs who were with her at the time of the shooting.

“I’ve just been nudged, told to get busy. There’s a lot of love even though there’s madness like this out there. (I’ve got to) teach children that there is no need for violence.

“We have to treat each other like human beings,” she sputtered as tears began to roll. “The world is getting so sick. What do you get by being mean? You just have to work at being nice.”

That Thursday afternoon, the day of the shooting, Salot was buzzing around town in her maroon 1988 Honda Accord overflowing with errands, oblivious to the shooting spree that had terrorized the county. Hilbun allegedly had stabbed his mother and family dog to death and then killed a friend and former co-worker at the Dana Point post office,

“I don’t listen to radio news, I’m too busy,” she shrugged with her one good shoulder. “I’ve got my to-do list in my head.”

After picking up some doodads at a shop on Newport Boulevard, Salot was on her way to Irvine to mail a package about 3 p.m. when she spotted Hilbun’s truck--adorned with the sign for her business, Plane Talk, which sells accessories for radio-controlled airplane enthusiasts.

“I looked, I looked, I thought I was crazy,” she recalled. “There are only two (signs) like it in the world. I thought, ‘What are you doing with my signs on?’ ”

When Hilbun saw her peering at him, Salot honked her horn and beckoned toward the man in the blue baseball cap.

“He got out of his car and said, ‘You follow me, I’ll kill you,’ ” she remembered, astonished still. “I thought to myself, ‘Just play it cool, Patti, just get the license plate.’ No way am I going to approach him after he said something like that.”

So Salot followed the blue pick-up onto a residential neighborhood street. She stopped about three car-lengths behind Hilbun and reached over to the glove compartment for a pad and pen.

But the plastic pen-cover broke, and as she fussed with the ink, Salot saw Hilbun staring at her through his rear-view mirror.

“I saw the gun in his left hand (and him) moving toward me and I froze,” she said, shaking as she spoke. “After that everything was in slow motion.”

“I saw him here,” she said, touching her bandaged face and knocking her head to the side as though the gunshots were riveting through her again. “And then I felt my face go, ‘Wham!’ And he kept shooting. . . . I felt like I was in a wind tunnel. The blast was on my ear. . . . And then I looked and I saw all this blood and the pieces on my hand and I felt all the warmth running down.”

She paused.

“I felt like I was dying,” Salot said. “It didn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop. I thought, ‘I’m going to be in a million pieces. All of a sudden I was losing my face.”

Her left side filled with five or six bullets, Salot somehow put her car in drive. A UPS delivery man helped get her to the hospital.

But the image of Hilbun coming at her, gun in hand, is haunting her with nightmares.

“I just see him walking toward me, with the smell of gunpowder on my face, I hate guns,” she wailed. “I hate guns, I hate guns, I hate guns, I hate guns, I hate guns, I hate guns. All my life I hate guns.

“Why me? I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not a bad person.”

Even in daylight, fear remains. As she was transferred from one hospital to the other last week, Salot said, her heart pounded as she felt like open prey to anyone in a truck.

She has abandoned her beloved Honda--the first new car she ever owned--and plans to buy a truck so she can be higher off the ground, safer.

In the 10 days since the shooting, support and love have poured forth from the community. A second-grade class sent get-well letters and drawings and dozens have made donations to help with the medical bills.

“I hope where he shot you feels better,” one child scribbled. “I hope you’re having a nice day.”

Like a war veteran, Salot has shrapnel embedded in her shoulder, her cheek and her breast. Monday evening her mother washed bullet particles from her arm. Some, though, will never be removed.

“I’m leaded, like coffee,” she gurgled, joking. “I love coffee.”

Though the pain in her face and skinless little finger remains excruciating, and a litany of surgeries fill her future, Salot looks forward, brimming with excitement.

“God didn’t do something bad to me; he just tested me. He said, ‘Can you handle this?’ ” she explained. “Let’s get something going here, whether it be new laws, or whether it be for children, or whether it’s giving a hug. . . . I love to give hugs. It’s simple, it’s free.

“I’m not going to say, ‘I should’ve done that, I should’ve done that,’ ” Salot insisted. “I’m just going to make a change. My life is short, but I have enough time.”