Girl Describes Lasting Scars of Cougar Attack

SANTA ANA —  Laura Small, the girl mauled by a mountain lion at Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park five years ago, testified Wednesday that she remembers wading in a stream and searching for tadpoles with her mother when the animal suddenly sprang from a bush and attacked her.

“I was being dragged on the ground and all these thorns were going into my legs,” Laura said. “I thought it was a big dog.”

The next thing she remembers, she said, was her mother and father taking turns carrying her back to the park’s visitor center for help and “talking about how my face was all torn to pieces.”

Asked what she misses the most since the attack, Laura said, “dancing really nice and good, riding my bike, and not having to go to the hospital that often--and making friends.”

Five years and 15 surgeries later, the 10-year-old El Toro girl is the center of a negligence lawsuit against Orange County. She could recall only fragments of the cougar attack on March 23, 1986, that partially paralyzed her right arm and leg, blinded her in one eye and left numerous other physical and emotional scars.

Jurors watched intently as Laura, dressed in a flowered blouse and black pants, limped up to the witness stand. She was ushered into the courtroom through the judge’s chambers so she could avoid the crush of photographers and television crews waiting for her in the hallway.

Calmly responding to questions from attorneys, Laura told the jury that seconds before the attack she “heard some rustling from a bush” behind her. When the mountain lion grabbed her by the head in its powerful jaws, the girl said, she remembers her mother screaming and the cougar dragging her into the brush.

She said she has no memory of her rescue by a hiker who grabbed a stick and poked at the mountain lion until it released her.

Laura also testified about how she has coped with her disabilities since the attack. She has trouble doing simple things, such as tying shoelaces or picking up small objects, she said.

She said she occasionally feels “frustration” because she can’t do those simple things. Sometimes when she’s upset, she said, “I hit my bed.”

Naturally right-handed, the girl’s partial paralysis has forced her to learn to use her left hand to accomplish most tasks because she has little strength or mobility in her right arm, Laura said.

A bag filled with saline solution has been attached beneath Laura’s scalp as part of a procedure to stretch hair-bearing skin over scarred portions of her skull, doctors have testified.

Although she does well academically at Olivewood Elementary School in El Toro, Laura said she is occasionally the brunt of her schoolmates’ cruel jokes. She said she has trouble “making friends. Everyone makes fun of me and calls me ‘cat girl’ and things like that.”

Laura said she enjoys poetry, books and horseback riding. She also likes her ballet class, but her injuries hamper her performance, she said.

“I can’t point my foot, and that is a real major thing in ballet,” she said.

Laura’s mother, Susan Mattern-Small, testified that until last year she was repeatedly haunted by images of her daughter’s attack “replaying like a videotape in my mind.”

“The slightest thing would trigger it,” she said. “The sound of a dripping faucet would remind me of the stream there.”

During part of her testimony, Mattern-Small narrated parts of a home video collection of Laura before and after the attack. At one point, the girl is seen struggling to put on her shoes.

“We keep encouraging her to do all these things,” the mother said.

The Smalls’ attorney, Wylie A. Aitken, commented on Laura’s positive attitude and asked Mattern-Small if her daughter had an “overly optimistic” opinion of her potential recovery.

“I think so,” Mattern-Small said.

Aitken has contended that county and park officials were negligent because they knew about the dangers of mountain lions in the park before the mauling and did nothing to warn the public.

After Laura testified, Aitken told reporters that the case was “not about sympathy, it’s about responsibility. (The county) had an opportunity to protect the public and didn’t.”

County officials, however, have denied any wrongdoing.

Defense attorney Barry Allen has repeatedly said that “the county cannot be held responsible for a wild mountain lion.”

He admitted that county officials had checked into several sightings of mountain lions, but that the conventional wisdom at the time of the attack was that the large cats “were shy and secretive animals that had a healthy aversion to humans.” Never, he said, had a mountain lion been known to attack a human in Southern California.

Earlier in the 3-week-old trial, however, two county park rangers testified that they had become concerned enough about the “unusual” sightings to contact state authorities to see what they should do.

An official with the state Department of Fish and Game told a park ranger that they should warn the public and “discourage human/mountain lion contact,” the state and county rangers testified.

Bruce Buchman, the senior park ranger at Caspers, said that he even discussed with his supervisor the possibility of warning park visitors several days before Laura was attacked. The supervisor, he said, planned to suggest the idea to other county officials.