‘86 Mauling Limits Her Motions, Not Dreams
Laura Small understands why people would want her reaction to the mountain lion attacks Thursday that killed one man and left a woman seriously injured. After all, there aren’t many people who know what it’s like to be frolicking in a park one second -- a 5-year-old girl on a Sunday afternoon looking for tadpoles -- and in the next locked up in the jaws of a mountain lion and carried off into the brush.
One second. Maybe five. That’s all it takes to change the course of a person’s life, and that’s what it took to change Laura’s and that of her parents, Donald and Susan Small, on a March day in 1986.
Now 22 and living in Laguna Niguel, Laura would be willing to recount being in the lion’s clutches -- if she could. Instead, she remembers only going to Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park that day and, in her last memory, thinking a dog was running at her.
It’s left to her mother, five feet away when the mountain lion struck, to recount it. Her husband and 9-year-old son, Dave, had gone off on their own, Susan says, leaving her and Laura in a 2-inch-deep stream. At one point, Laura let go of her mother’s hand and bent over. “Out of the corner of my eye,” Susan says, “I thought it was a dog running toward her. By the time I realized it was a mountain lion, he grabbed her by the head and then they were gone.”
The next few minutes exist in her memory only in shrouded form. “I’ve always wanted to regain those few minutes, maybe by hypnosis or something,” Susan says, “but after it grabbed her by the head, I don’t remember anything. I remember standing in the stream and Laura wasn’t there and it was total silence. You know how you hear all the birds and everything ... and all of a sudden it was just quiet. There was no sound, and she wasn’t there. I saw the cat run up to her and I went blank.”
She screamed, however, and Don came running down a trail from about 100 yards away. Piecing together what Susan had said, Don ran back up the trail and cut into the brush, hoping to intercept the cat.
“I knew if it went that way and kept going, we’d never find her,” he says. He got lucky. He heard Laura moan. He burst into the brush, as did another hiker who poked the cat with a stick. The cat released Laura, and Don picked her up and carried her back down the trail.
Thirty-eight days later, Laura left the hospital after treatment for a variety of head and eye injuries, including a crushed skull and a punctured eyeball. Part of her brain was removed, which she jokingly says cost her some math skills. She lost sight in her right eye and is partially paralyzed on her right side. She can walk and retains large motor skills but not more detailed ones, such as writing.
Follow-up surgeries spanned several years, and she wore a helmet to school for five years to protect a part of her head where her skull had been crushed.
You might think news of another mountain lion attack might send the Small family on a time-travel trip they don’t want to take. It’s not like that, they say. All three express sorrow and sympathy for the victims of last week’s attack but say it didn’t reopen psychic wounds of their own.
Sitting with her parents in their Lake Forest home, Laura isn’t transfixed as the details are retold. “It just seems like a story, like we’re talking about a story that didn’t happen to me,” she says. “It was so long ago, and it’s so weird. I guess it’s had an effect on my life, but not in an emotional way, so much. It seems like it happened to someone else. Talking about it doesn’t really bother me. It’s probably more traumatic for my parents, because they had to see the whole thing happen. I was so young when it happened. I never had nightmares, I was never really scared -- well, I was scared of dogs for a long time. Any big animal.”
That passed, and her greatest lament now is that her paralysis makes some things impossible. “Every once in a while, there’s something I really want to do and I can’t, and that bothers me,” Laura says. “Like, I want to learn to play the piano. Even if I really tried, there’s still no way I can really get around it (the loss of right-hand usage). But I’m just glad that most of the things I really want to do are not limited in that way.”
Her parents laud her for her resiliency, spirit, sense of curiosity and refusal to limit herself. She, in turn, credits them for not letting her slip into a self-pitying mode. An accomplished amateur painter, she’s taking classes at Irvine Valley College that she hopes will lead to veterinary school and eventual work with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The Smalls don’t have a vengeful streak toward mountain lions. Laura says she doesn’t know enough to have a completely informed opinion, but believes that humans in some cases are too insensitive to animals’ natural habitat. However, she says, humans are entitled to land too and she hopes for balance in human-animal coexistence.
In 1993, the Smalls reached a settlement with Orange County for Laura’s care over her lifetime, the result of a lawsuit based on what they believe was the county’s failure to adequately warn people of the potential for mountain lion danger. Laura reportedly will get about $1 million over her lifetime from the settlement.
As we talk, I suggest that to many people she’s frozen in their memories as the 5-year-old girl who survived the jaws of death.
We get around to talking about the freakish nature of the incident and, as the family says several times, how it seems like it happened to someone else.
I ask Don, who was relatively clear-headed in the moments after the attack, when the reality of what happened to Laura hit him.
“It soaked in over a few days,” he says. “It was so off-the-wall. You can’t really believe it. It was like, ‘OK, pretend this is real. What do you do?’ And that’s what I was doing, and I still couldn’t believe it was real.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.