Granny fights for her life - and wins

Vivian Squires smiled as she emerged from the elevator and was wheeled toward reporters, flanked by people holding bouquets of flowers that had been sent to her. “I’m going home,” she said excitedly.
“I can’t believe this. I made it,” said the 86-year-old grandmother - who just two days earlier was attacked in her Springfield Gardens home as she slept. “It was quite an experience. I couldn’t figure out what was happening.”
On Tuesday, January 6, Squires was released from Mary Immaculate Hospital, and she talked about the ordeal that left her with slashes on her neck and back.
She said that she was sleeping and heard noise at the window; when she looked, she saw a man standing there. She thought it was her nephew Tony, she said.
“I said, ‘Tony.’ And this person swung around and ran and jumped on the bed on top of me,” she recalled. “He took the pillow and put it over my head, and he took a knife and slashed my throat.
“I felt all the blood. I thought I was dying. We tussled and tussled and I ended [up] on the floor. And I was still fighting him, trying to remember all the things I’ve seen in the movies.”
Then the man slashed her back.
“All I kept saying was, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’ And it’s almost like I felt the power going in all of this fighting. And he disappeared - he just left. I don’t know how he got out. I don’t know what happened.”
“We were very happy that she was successfully able to go through this process and come out of it strong enough to go home this morning,” said Noel Blackman, an attending vascular surgeon. “However, her injuries were life-threatening in the sense that many of them were quite deep and were bleeding heavily.”
Police say the suspect, who is still at large, stole cash, jewelry and even the retired preschool teacher’s sedan.
“I said, ‘No, Vivian, you haven’t got time to die. You have too much to do.’ So I decided not to die and I started fighting him,” she told her well-wishers.
She said maybe her 21 years of experience as a corrections officer helped her out.
“If I’d had a gun, he’d be gone,” she joked.
“It boggles the mind why anyone would try hurt her,” said neighbor Tommy Harrington, 32. “She was my Pre-K teacher and I’ve known her all my life. [She is] a great woman.”
Harrington also said that the neighborhood is a quiet one.
“Everyone knows everyone,” he said. “We haven’t had a problem with crime in the area.”
Squires said that she will go to Florida with her daughter, Cassell Beckles, and son-in-law for a while, but that she will return to her home.
“I have go home,” she chuckled. “I’d be a chicken if I didn’t, and I’m not going to do that. I have to go home.”