Good Samaritan’s Sacrifice Is Matter of the Heart, Not Heroism : Crime: She ignored her own safety in a bid to help a woman flee an armed attacker. Left paralyzed, she says it was a ‘small price to pay.’

Jaquie Creazzo eases her wheelchair slowly toward a table at a fast-food restaurant as her three young daughters scramble about on its multicolored, plastic playground.

Some lunchtime patrons whisper as she passes. A few approach, shake hands and thank Creazzo, “the Good Samaritan” who was shot three times as she tried to save a young woman in a desperate race against a gunman.

Months later, Creazzo, 31, of Wheat Ridge, is struggling to live in a body paralyzed from the chest down by a bullet lodged in her spine.

“The most frustrating thing is just what you’ve lost personally, like laying in bed and having a muscle spasm; your legs not doing the simplest things,” she said.

“Thankfully, I’m still alive. Being paralyzed is a small price to pay to get this person, actually if you want to call him a person, off the street.”

It’s an extraordinary, selfless attitude for a woman who has overcome obstacle after obstacle during her life.

Creazzo had a difficult childhood after her parents divorced in a bitter dispute. She lived with her mother on the East Coast until she was an older teen-ager. Then she moved in with her father and they settled in Colorado.

Creazzo soon married, but she and her husband grew apart and realized they would be better off divorced, as friends, sharing custody of the girls.

“Everything in my life has been a struggle, and I’ve had to overcome it,” she said. “That’s what I have done my whole life . . . all I know is to keep fighting.”

With sun streaming through the restaurant’s glass walls, Creazzo speaks softly in a deep voice, recalling how her pre-dawn encounter with Rhonda Maloney on Feb. 12 changed her life forever.

On her way to pick up her father for breakfast, Creazzo’s Cadillac rounded a freeway ramp curve and illuminated with its headlights two parked cars, one with flashers blinking.

Thinking one vehicle had broken down, Creazzo inched by, but the look on the face of a young blond woman standing by the road compelled her to stop.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Creazzo said. “It was just like there was the need and it was written all over her face. There wasn’t any question, and I think anybody who had been in that situation and seen the intensity on her face would have stopped as well.”

Maloney jumped into Creazzo’s car, her words tumbling over one another into a horrific tale of being run off the road, of being dragged from her car onto the frozen ground, of being raped repeatedly.

As Creazzo pulled away to get help, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a man get into the other car.

The race began.

The two cars jockeyed for position, their tires fighting for traction on the icy road. Creazzo swerved between cars, trying to stay ahead of her pursuer, but he gradually gained ground and pulled alongside.

Creazzo glanced up and saw the window move on the other car and the flash of gunfire.

Bullets smacked into her car and struck her in the knee, mouth and back. Bleeding from the wounds, Creazzo fought to maintain control, sparks flying as the car scraped the median rail.

She steered her vehicle across the median and onto the snowy front lawn of the Thornton Police Department.

Slumped in the front seat, covered with blood and spitting out teeth, Creazzo watched as the gunman got out of his car, looked up and down the street and walked toward her.

He dragged Maloney from the car and threw her to the ground. When he reached back for Maloney’s things, his eyes met Creazzo’s.

“Neither one of us said anything,” she recalls. “It was like a dead stare.

“It just seemed like it hung for an eternity. His eyes are so dark and so empty and so cold and it was, I don’t know, something that will live with me forever, probably.”

The gunman grabbed Maloney’s belongings, picked her up like a rag doll and headed for his car.

It was the last time she was seen alive.

With Creazzo’s help, police arrested Robert E. Harlan, 29, within days. He is facing trial in January on charges of first-degree murder and assault. Maloney’s body was found in a water-filled culvert on the prairie east of metropolitan Denver a week later.

As Creazzo fought for her life, her heroism captured the heart of metropolitan Denver, which dubbed her “the Good Samaritan.”

Maloney’s husband, Kerry, issued a statement that said: “She is a real hero, and without her, we never would have known what happened to Rhonda.”

Maloney’s family also gave Creazzo a pair of golden hoop earrings with guardian angels as a token of their support.

Six weeks after the incident, doctors told Creazzo she would never walk again.

She sought a second opinion; the results were the same.

She shed tears, denying her fate for a time. Then she resolved to move ahead, hoping in her heart to walk again someday.

Now, Creazzo is learning how to shift from a life without limits to a life where everything has limits.

She now looks at the world from a permanent seated position, learning to balance her body all over again and to cope with muscle spasms. “When they start, it’s like you’re fighting your own body,” she said.

She now rolls her wheelchair slowly, ever conscious of cracks and bumps that could topple her to the ground, helpless. Caution has captured her, particularly with her children, Hannah, 12, Elizabeth, 11, and Martha, 9. But it has not imprisoned her will.

Recently, she and her daughters were leaving a grocery store when they saw a man snatch a shopper’s purse. Creazzo and her girls chased the man as far as she could in her van but couldn’t catch him.

“Although we went to help this woman catch the purse snatcher, I couldn’t really do anything,” she said. “So especially where they’re concerned, I’m fearful about what my limitations in protecting them are.”

Her periods of frustration are balanced by optimism.

She is looking forward to returning to work as an administrative assistant in the fall. And she is teaching her daughters some valuable lessons about life, by dismissing her heroism--recognized by a wall of plaques, medals and certificates--as something for which everyone should strive.

“These awards don’t make me any different,” she tells her daughters. “What you are has to come from inside, and all the awards and all the medals on the wall can’t make you.

“They can’t make you happy. They can’t make you feel good about yourself. You have to feel good about yourself already.”