Local Aid Offers Scarred Woman a Chance to Heal

In a matter of minutes, Carol Guscott’s life went from placid normalcy to absolute horror.

As she closed her hardware shop in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in July 1994, two men robbed her at gunpoint, bound her hands and feet and then, unprovoked, poured battery acid on her face and chest.

That was only the beginning of her agony.

Soon, her family, friends and neighbors, who could not bear to look at her deformed face and vacant eyes, abandoned her.

She could no longer run her store because the acid left her blind. She was evicted from her apartment and lived on the street for three months with her sole companion, her 10-year-old son.

But now, through the efforts of a Connecticut woman, Guscott has hope: A team of surgeons in Orange County is reconstructing her face.

Sitting in a local plastic surgeon’s chair, a year and seven months after the attack, Guscott is hoping for a new lease on life.

“I can’t believe this!” said Guscott, 36, now recovering from the first operation on her face. “The kindness and support I have received is just overwhelming. I didn’t expect anything like this.”

Paulette Allen didn’t expect to meet anyone like Guscott while vacationing in Jamaica last March.

Allen was so moved that, through a network of friends at her church, she persuaded her pastor to arrange for Guscott to receive extensive plastic surgery from a doctor acquaintance in Orange County.

She had her first operation in January, to replace her eyelids, and is scheduled for a second one in two weeks. Altogether she will need seven operations over the next year and a half.

The attack came on a typical day, as she tended her shop in the small town 80 miles from Kingston, the capital.

Guscott thought nothing of the fact that two men she had turned away because they tried to sell her shoddy lumber vowed they would return to get her. They kept their promise a few days later.

One of the men put a knife to her throat while the other bound her hands and feet. They sat her on a wooden chair and poured battery acid from her forehead down, watching it drip on her chest, her inner thighs and her left arm. They left her writhing in pain.

“It was a burning of hell fire,” said Guscott, who had opened her hardware store only six months before. “I often wonder how these people could do this to a helpless woman.”

She received some medical attention in Jamaica, but not enough to heal the terrible wounds.

When her father saw what happened to her, he fainted, Guscott said. Her friends suddenly disappeared, telling her they could not look at her grotesque features. Her landlord demanded that she and her son leave because he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

Fearful of retaliation, she did not report the incident. In any event, she would have been hard pressed to identify her attackers because of her blindness.

So, Guscott, who described herself as a social person before the incident, became reclusive, avoiding everyone except her son. She supported herself with savings and lived on the streets.

“It has been hell for me,” Guscott said. “I have lost everything. [The incident] hurt my son badly. I always tell him, ‘Don’t have any hatred.’ I always encourage him that things will get better.”

Things did get better.

Although she was homeless, the bank she had done business with placed posters in its main office describing her situation.

And it was there that Paulette Allen came into her life.

Appalled by the brutality of Guscott’s attackers and by her ordeal, Allen went to work with the tightknit community of her Seventh-day Adventist Church in Hartford, Conn. Within months, they established a West Coast connection, and the Kansas Avenue Seventh-day Adventist Church in Riverside came to her aid.

Through the Riverside church, a plastic surgeon, a therapist, caretakers and a fund-raising operation was begun.

Facial plastic surgeon Harrell Robinson, whose practice is based in Orange, immediately agreed to perform the surgery for free and enlisted the help of two other doctors, also from Orange County.

Her first surgery, performed in January, enabled her to open and close her new eyelids. Her original set had burned off in the attack.

Robinson sees Guscott’s operations as one of the biggest challenges of his career.

“This is probably the most extensive facial plastic surgery procedure I have ever done,” said Robinson, who has been practicing in Orange since 1985. “For the amount of damage that has been done to her face, it is surprising that she is not suicidal. But Carol has a real strong constitution and a forgiving soul.”

Alice Powell, a congregant at the Riverside church, organized the fund-raising for Guscott’s operations. She grocery shops twice a week for Guscott and found accommodations for her at an Anaheim Hills hotel.

“She has a great desire to live and to get back to taking care of herself,” said Powell, whose daughter Cynthia, a psychologist, is providing free therapy sessions for Guscott. “She doesn’t want you to feel sorry for her. She just wants help so she can get back on her feet.”

But Guscott is in need of donations, Powell said.

Guscott’s 30-day payment of hotel accommodations, funded by the Connecticut church, will expire Thursday. Powell has established a trust fund for Guscott at Bank of America but needs to raise $100,000 to cover food, hotel and costs for medicine and ointments for the next year and a half. So far $500 has been raised.

Robinson estimates that Guscott will have to undergo at least seven more operations.

Meanwhile, Guscott spends her days in seclusion, reflecting and exercising to a Richard Simmons videotape.

She doesn’t like to think of the fact that her assailants were never captured. At times she is saddened by the lack of empathy shown to her in her homeland. And she misses her son, who is staying with her mother in Jamaica.

Still, she is hopeful that she will overcome her misfortune.

“This gives me hope for a brighter tomorrow,” said Guscott, who is scheduled for surgery on her nose, shoulder and eyelids in two weeks. “I know I am a beautiful person on the inside and somehow that beauty can come back out again. I just want to be able to earn a dollar for my son and family.”