Kidnap Victim Says Priorities Have Changed : Abduction: Paula Harrington, reflecting on three-day ordeal that ended in Arizona motel room, says she will start a family.

When Chris and Paula Harrington of Val Verde were married nearly six years ago, they agreed to hold off on starting a family to work instead on their careers. He is a civil attorney and she is a real estate agent.

But after surviving a three-day armed kidnaping ordeal that began last week at her Castaic office and ended Friday in Gila Bend, Ariz., where she was found bound and gagged in a motel room, Paula Harrington said Sunday that her priorities have changed.

“Chris and I have decided to start having kids,” she announced to her family, which gathered at her mother’s Yorba Linda home to celebrate her safe return and the birthdays of three family members. “Life is too important. I’m not just interested in making money anymore.”

“I think we’ll be spending less hours working and spending more time together,” echoed Chris Harrington.

Paula Harrington’s ordeal began last Wednesday when she left her office with a man who had walked in and asked for an agent to show him houses in the area. But when she failed to return by 6 p.m., Harrington’s co-workers notified the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Detectives tracking the use of her credit and bank cards discovered that she had made withdrawals Wednesday night in Hacienda Heights and Thursday night in El Centro, near the Mexican border.

She was found Friday morning tied to a bed in a motel room in Gila Bend, about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, after a maid heard muffled cries for help. At the same time, the kidnaper called Harrington’s office and told workers there where she could be found.

Harrington identified her abductor from FBI photo mug shots as Timothy Daniel Shue, 38, a fugitive with numerous aliases who is also a suspect in a number of similar crimes that have occurred since he fled authorities last month in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he was wanted in a fraud case, according to FBI officials.

FBI agents said they had tracked Shue from Michigan to Oregon to California.

Harrington has been told by FBI investigators not to discuss details of the abduction. As of Sunday night, federal agents said there were no new leads in finding Shue.

But on Sunday, with her family gathered around her, Harrington, 26, said in an interview that it was primarily her faith in God that got her through the ordeal.

“It went through stages,” she said of her emotions. “There were probably several times along the way that I thought I was going to die, that I wouldn’t see my family again. But there finally came a time when I made up mind that no matter what happened, for however long I had left to live, I was going to survive.

“Once I decided in my mind, that because of my faith, I wasn’t afraid to die, because I didn’t think it was the end, it helped me deal with the reality rather than be frozen in fear. I just kept that faith.”

Harrington said she also worried about what her family was going through not knowing what was happening to her.

“I was thinking about my family and what they were having to endure,” she said. “It was very painful to me, probably more so than what I was dealing with.

“But I did continually have hope that things would be OK. I had that hope through staying calm, through trying to have a calming effect on the guy who took me. I’m usually a hyperactive person and I talk a lot. I’m active, but I thought that if I stayed calm and spoke slowly and told him before I made any moves, it would keep him cool.”

Harrington said that having her friends and family constantly around her has helped her deal with her traumatic experience. But she knows that she will eventually have to confront it alone to put it behind her.

“There will come a time when I will have to deal with it on my own,” she said. “It helps to have people around and all the hugs and the support. But I’m sure in the next day or two there will be a time when I can be alone and cry, because I need to cry. I haven’t had that chance yet.”

Still, she said, there was never any question in her mind that Sunday’s birthday party for her husband and two sisters-in-law should go forward as had been previously planned.

“I need to be with my family now. I don’t want to be alone right now,” she said. “When you’ve been through something traumatizing like this, you need to fall back to a normal schedule. I wanted the party to go forward. I want things to be normal again.”