BREAKING HER SILENCE: Lana Rosas, smashed into a coma over a parking spot, wants her attacker punished at sentencing today.
BREAKING HER SILENCE: Lana Rosas, smashed into a coma over a parking spot, wants her attacker punished at sentencing today. (
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She’d like nothing more than to spit in his face — but she’ll settle for watching him get thrown in jail.
Every bit the spitfire she was in February 2011 — when she stood her ground over an East 14th Street parking spot, with terrible consequences — “parking punch” victim Lana Rosas spoke out for the first time yesterday.
“Mom asked me if I wanted to give a statement,” at the Manhattan Supreme Court sentencing today of Oscar Fuller, the man who slugged her into a coma, Rosas told The Post in an exclusive interview yesterday.
“But the only thing I want to do is spit in this dude’s face, which I’m not going to do.”
Then she broke into a mischievous smile, adding, “You know, contempt, and all that stuff. He’s the scum of the earth, but I can’t do anything about it.”
Fuller, a muscle-bound electrician from Queens, faces up to a year in jail for punching Rosas in the face so hard as they stood arguing over a parking spot, that she flew off her feet, several witnesses said.
The back of Rosas’ head hit the pavement with a sickening clunk, witnesses said. And, as the 4-foot-11 woman lay motionless on the pavement, bleeding from the mouth, nose and ears, Fuller got back into his minivan and took off.
A Bellevue trauma surgeon braced Rosas’ mom for the worst that night, telling Angie Harrison her daughter could die.
She spent six days in a coma, was hospitalized three months, and has had repeated surgeries. The last procedure was in December, two days after her 26th birthday, to repair the gaping hole prior surgeries had left in the front of her skull.
To this day, she has a shunt in her skull, and receives therapy twice a week at NYU Langone Medical Center’s famed Rusk Institute. She cannot drive or work — “Dain bramage!” Rosas jokes in explanation.
“They had to teach her to walk,” said family lawyer David Oddo. “They had to teach her to speak.”
“She had been intubated so long, they had to teach her to tell her brain to swallow,” added her mother, to which Rosas chirped, “I don’t remember that!”
For the first four weeks after her injury, Rosas lay in her bed, essentially wordless, her mother remembered.
Then one day, “I left her my iPod,” Harrison said, her voice choking. “I’ll never forget. She started singing along to Simon and Garfunkel.”
Here, the mom broke into gasping sobs, recalling, “She remembered all the words to ‘The Sound of Silence.’ It was the first time I thought, maybe my daughter is going to be OK.”
In May, Fuller was acquitted of felony assault and convicted of misdemeanor assault, which carries a maximum of one year in jail. Rosas and her devoted mom, who will give a victim-impact statement today, want him to get the max.
Asked what she’d hope Fuller thinks about in jail, Rosas quipped, “He doesn’t have a soul, so I don’t think he’s going to be thinking about anything in jail — except saving his tuches [backside]!”
“She remembers Yiddish!” her mom responded with a smile. “So strange, this child.”