A Central Park Victim Recalls ‘When I Was Hurt,’ and Her Healing
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: June 8, 2006
On an album of bittersweet children’s songs that she wrote more than a
decade ago, the woman who came to be known only as “the piano teacher”
offered what, in hindsight, seems like an eerie glimpse of her own
future.
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Go to Blog »”I’m moving away today to a place so far away, where
nobody knows my name,” she wrote in the lyrics of a song called
“Moving.”
When she wrote that song, she was young and vivacious, a piano teacher
and freelance music writer who loved Beethoven and jazz, sunsets and
river sounds, long walks and everything about New York.
On one of those beloved walks, through Central Park in the bright sun
of a June day in 1996, a homeless drifter beat her and tried to rape
her, leaving her clinging to life. After the attack, the words to her
song came true. She “moved away,” out of New York City, out of her old
life, and all but her closest friends did not know her name. To the
rest of the world, she was – like the more famous jogger attacked in
Central Park seven years earlier – an anonymous symbol of an urban
nightmare. She was “the piano teacher.”
Now, on the 10th anniversary of the attack, she is celebrating what
seems to be her full recovery from brain trauma. She is 42, married,
with a small child. She is Kyle Kevorkian McCann, the piano teacher,
and she wants to tell her story, her way.
Her doctor told her it would take 10 years to recover, and Sunday was
that talismanic anniversary. “I feel my life has been redefined by
Central Park,” she said several days ago, her voice soft and
hopeful. “Before park; after park. Will there ever be a time when I
don’t think, ‘Oh, this is the 10th anniversary, the 11th
anniversary’?”
She spoke in her modest ranch house in a wooded subdivision in a New
York suburb. She sat in a dining room strewn with toys, surrounded by
photographs of her cherubic, dark-haired 2-year-old daughter. A
Steinway grand filled half the room, and at one point she sat down and
played. Her playing was forceful, but she seemed embarrassed to play
more than a few bars, and shrugged, rather than answering, when asked
the name of the piece. She asked that her daughter and her town not be
named.
She calls that day, June 4, 1996, the day “when I was hurt.”
Hers was the first in a string of attacks by the same man on four
women over eight days. The last victim, Evelyn Alvarez, 65, was beaten
to death as she opened her Park Avenue dry-cleaning shop, and
ultimately, the assailant, John J. Royster, was convicted of murder
and sentenced to life in prison.
Yet the attack on the piano teacher is the one people seem to remember
the most. Part of the fascination has to do with echoes of the 1989
attack on the Central Park jogger. But it also frightened people in a
way the attack on the jogger did not because its circumstances were so
mundane.
It did not take place in a remote part of the park late at night, but
near a popular playground at 3 in the afternoon. It could have
happened to anyone. The tension was heightened by the mystery of the
piano teacher’s identity.
For three days, as police and doctors tried to find out who she was,
she lay in a coma in her hospital bed, anonymous. Her parents were on
vacation and her boyfriend, also a musician, was in Europe, on
tour. Finally, one of her students recognized a police sketch and was
able to identify her in the hospital by her fingers, because her face
was swollen beyond recognition. The police did not release her name.
The last thing she remembers about June 4, 1996, is giving a lesson in
her studio apartment on West 57th Street, then putting her long hair
in a ponytail and going out for a walk. She does not remember the
attack, although she has heard the accounts of the police and
prosecutors.
“To me it’s like a fact I learned and memorized,” she said. “As if I
were a student in school studying history.”
She does not think about the man who did it. “I might have been angry
for a moment, but not much longer than that,” she said. “How could I
be angry at John Royster? He was declared not insane, but I guess by
our standards he was.”
Dr. Jamshid Ghajar, her doctor at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical
Center, as it was known in 1996, told reporters that she had a 10
percent chance of survival. Doctors had to remove her forehead bone,
which was later replaced, to make room for her swelling brain. When
her mother made a public appeal to “pray for my daughter,” thousands
did.
After eight days, she came out of a coma, first in a vegetative state,
then in a childlike state. As she recovered, she slept little and
talked constantly, sometimes in gibberish. “I was getting mad at
people when they didn’t respond to these words,” she said.
Like an Alzheimer’s patient, she had little short-term memory and
would forget visitors as soon as they left the room.
Over several months, she had to relearn how to walk, dress, read and
write. Her boyfriend, Tony Scherr, visited every day to play guitar
for her. He encouraged her to play the piano, against the advice of
her physical therapists, who thought she would be frustrated by her
inability to play the way she once had. Mr. Scherr played Beatles
duets with her, playing the left-hand part while she played the right.
“That was my best therapy,” she said.
In August, she moved back home to New Jersey, with her father, an
engineer, and mother, a schoolteacher. She visited old haunts and
called friends, trying to restore her shattered memory. “I was very
obsessed with remembering,” she said. “Any memory loss was to me a
sign of abnormality or deficit.”
Her therapists thought her progress was terrific, but her two sisters
protested that she was not the deep thinker she had been.
What bothered her most was that she had lost the ability to cry, as if
a faucet inside her brain had been turned off. One night, nine months
after she was hurt, she stayed up late to watch the John Grisham movie
“A Time to Kill.” Just after her father had gone to bed, she watched a
courtroom scene of Samuel Jackson’s character on trial for killing two
men who had raped his young daughter.
The faucet opened, and the tears trickled down her cheeks. “I thought
about my parents, my father, and what they went through,” she
said. “Little by little, my feeling returned, my depth of mind
returned.”
Urged by her sisters, she went back to school and got a master’s
degree in music education.
Not everything went well. She and Mr. Scherr split up five years after
the attack, though they remain friends. She dated other men, but she
always told them about the attack right away – she could not help it,
she said – and they never called for a second date.
“We have to find you someone,” her friend David Phelps, a guitar
player, said four years ago, before introducing her to Liam McCann, a
computer technician and amateur drummer. For once, she did not say
anything about the attack until she got to know Mr. McCann, and then
when she did, he admired her strength.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had often visited her at her bedside
while she was in the hospital, married them in his Times Square
office. She wore a blue dress and pearls. While she was pregnant, in a
burst of creativity, she and her friends recorded “When We’re Young,”
an album of children’s songs that she had written before the attack,
including the song “Moving.” Her ex-boyfriend, Mr. Scherr, produced
the CD. On it, her husband plays drums and she plays electric piano.
Is her life as it was? Not exactly, though she is reluctant to
attribute the differences to her injuries. Her last two piano students
left her, without calling to explain why, she said. She has resumed
playing classical music, but simple pieces, because her daughter does
not give her time to practice. As for jazz, “I don’t even try,” she
said.
She would like to drive more, feeling stranded in the suburbs, but she
is easily rattled. She tries to be content with staying home and
caring for her daughter.
Dr. Ghajar, a clinical professor of neurological surgery at what is
now called NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center,
who operated on Ms. Kevorkian McCann after the attack, said last week
that her level of recovery was rare. “She’s basically normal,” he
said.
Other experts, who are not personally familiar with Ms. Kevorkian
McCann’s case, are more cautious.
Regaining the ability to play the piano may involve an almost
mechanical process, a semiautomatic recall of what the fingers need to
do, said Dr. Yehuda Ben-Yishay, a professor of clinical rehabilitation
medicine at New York University School of Medicine. “Once
brain-injured, you are always brain-injured, for the rest of your
life,” Dr. Ben-Yishay said. “There is no cure, there is only intensive
compensation.”
The more telling part of a recovery, in his view, is psychological,
and on that score he counts Ms. Kevorkian McCann’s marriage and child
as a significant victory.
For her part, the piano teacher knows she has changed, but she has
made her peace with it. “I was sort of a hyper – – I don’t know if I
was a Type A, but I was ambitious,” she says. “Why was I so ambitious?
I was a piano teacher. I don’t know what the ambition was about. I
really did come back to the person I’m supposed to be.”