First to Fall, First Forgotten
NEW YORK — He can't drive. He can't tie his shoes. He can't count past 11 or remember your name. He lives next to the Brighton Beach boardwalk and can smell the salty summer air, but he must strain to see the ocean. His left eye is gone; sight in the other is half what it was.
He gets by on a wheelchair and a walker. A stroke during his recovery left his right side all but useless, his hand permanently twisted. Because he can't read, at night he turns on the television, to a music channel.
Lately, he's also been listening to a new game show called "Deal or No Deal," trying to understand the world again.
Louis Pepe is a former corrections officer at the Manhattan federal jail. He is 48 years old and lives with his aging mother. His sister is his legal guardian.
Almost a year before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Pepe became the first victim of Al Qaeda terrorists in America while he was on duty at the jail. A top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden stabbed him in the eye, but his name has barely registered outside New York. Unlike the Sept. 11 victims and families, Pepe has struggled to recover in almost complete anonymity.
Another blow came when a judge ruled in September 2003 in the case against his attacker that legally Pepe was not a victim of terrorism at all. She said the knife attack was not an act of terrorism because it did not "transcend international boundaries."
The judge's decision has forced the Pepe family to press all the harder for financial assistance from the federal government. He has had to fight for ambulatory care and other needs. Just this month, for instance, the government balked at paying for a new prosthetic eye before finally relenting.
In November 2000, Pepe was beaten by two suspects in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. They had planned to take hostages in return for a flight to freedom, but Pepe refused to hand over his jail keys. So one of them, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, plunged a homemade knife into his eye. Pepe could hear the ripping sound as it was shoved up his brain.
"You see this, Mr. G?" he said recently, pointing to the jagged hollow of his eye socket.
He not only can't remember names, he can't pronounce them either. He is unable to recognize one individual from another. To Pepe, your name is simply G.
"You see this, Mr. G?" he said. "This is what they did to me."
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