“Die! Die! Die!” a homeless, shirtless, madman had screamed last October at clinical psychologist Susan Barron, straddling her body and slashing her with knives during a bloody midtown sidewalk rampage.
Barron, miraculously, didn’t die. But today, as her attacker, off-his-meds schizophrenic Lee Coleman, was sentenced to 16 years in prison, Barron poignantly detailed her long list of terrible injuries from the blades that sliced at her head, throat, chest and hands.
“I will never again be able to feel a kiss on my lips from someone who loves me,” Barron, 68, told the sentencing judge in a statement read aloud by her sister, Chana.
The motor and sensory nerves on the right side of her face and lips were severed, Barron wrote – leaving her unable to smile, or to chew food without biting her own lips.
Coleman, 39, had stolen four knives from the Texas Smokehouse BBQ on Second Ave. at East 35th Street, slashing cook Amarjit Singh on his way out, before throwing Barron to the ground in the Oct. 2007 attack.
The resulting skull fractures and concussion have destroyed her stamina and balance, robbing her of her self-sufficiency, wrote Barron, who did not attend the sentencing.
Her hands were mangled by Coleman’s knife-work, and after four surgeries – with more pending – she still struggles to dress, do laundry, make meals and bathe.
“I can’t open bottles, cans, carry packages, hold an umbrella or lift anything because I have lost much of the sensation in my arms and hands,” Barron wrote.
Reading and drawing – two of her greatest pleasures – were taken from her by the nerve damage to her hands and right eye.
She also cannot continue in her beloved clinical psychology practice, Barron noted. Her patients lost both their doctor and their precarious sense of well-being.
“Their world became a horror after this graphic and unthinkably violent attack, when they saw newspaper pictures of me lying bloody in the street.”
Then there is the psychological damage – her fear of knives, and the flashbacks.
“The water hitting my face when I wash my hair feels like the blood coming down my face from the attack and brings me back to the trauma and anxiety stemming from that day.”
“The intensity of my sadness cannot be conveyed in words,” she concluded. “I will never forget the terror of that day or the feel of the knives.”
Coleman’s second victim, Singh, also did not attend, instead also sending a letter to the court. A cook for 22 years, who heroically came to Barron’s aid despite his own gushing wounds, he has been unable to work since the madman slashed his face and neck.
In his own brief statement, Coleman apologized, saying he prayed for his victims’ recovery. “I was not myself that day,” he said, in a letter read aloud by his lawyer, Tara Collins. “I hope some day you will be able to forgive me,” he told them.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Rena Uviller blamed the attack on a society that is laboring under a “lack of will” or a “misguided belief” that the mentally ill shouldn’t be forced to take their medications.
“This case is a tragic example of the mentally ill person who refuses to be medicated,” Uviller said. “Until society finds a way to compel compliance, these tragedies will continue to occur.”