Woman after wrestling knife-wielding man to floor: "I could be a dead hero."

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

By Erin Quinn

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Moments after Pat Frank-Estelle tackled him on the floor of a laundromat women’s restroom, wrenched the ice pick from his hands and began applying pressure to his bleeding chest, Michael Moorman spoke to her.

“You should let me die,” he told the woman. “I’m evil.”

“You haven’t even lived your life yet,” the soon-to-be grandmother told the 21-year-old man while pressing him to the ground with all her strength. “How in the devil do you think you have the right to do this to yourself? Not while I’m here.”

Frank-Estelle, 44, didn’t know it then, but police say the scrawny Whitney High School graduate had just surprised a Waco kindergartner in the laundromat bathroom and stabbed the little girl in the chest 10 times for no apparent reason before turning the ice pick on himself.

It was a typical evening at the Sanger Avenue Laundry Superstore that suddenly went terribly wrong. And Tuesday, as people searched for answers, the major players in the frighteningly bizarre stabbings were left only to question why.

After doctors told her family she had a 50/50 chance of living Monday night, 5-year-old Eileen Rivera on Tuesday was recovering from surgery in the intensive care unit of Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center. Her principal and teachers from Kendrick Elementary School had come to visit her, and her prognosis was good.

Michael Moorman was released from the same hospital Tuesday afternoon and taken directly to the McLennan County Jail on an attempted murder charge. Friends flooded his MySpace page with messages pondering why he would do such a thing.

Frank-Estelle couldn’t go to work Tuesday. She was still processing what had happened the night before. Even though people were patting her on the back and calling her a hero, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had done the right thing.

Cheryl Glocar, who is taking online courses to be a radiologist technician, couldn’t go to work either. She couldn’t even sleep. She saw only one image when she closed her eyes — little Eileen’s face. Frantic and crying, the girl who Glocar described as “beautiful” with curly black hair and wearing a red jacket begged Glocar not to touch her stab wounds.

The night had begun like any other at the Sanger Avenue Laundry Superstore — a tidy, spacious laundromat decorated with plants and flowers. It’s a place where people sit at modern-looking tables and snack while their clothes spin and their children play.

Frank-Estelle had gotten off work at her job as a massage therapist early. Her last appointment of the day didn’t show up, and she figured she’d pick up some chicken for dinner and head to the laundromat early.

Glocar had carried her dirty laundry in her car with her for three days, always finding an excuse not to do it. But on Monday she couldn’t put it off anymore. She needed towels.

Both women got there about 5:30 p.m., and the laundromat was bustling as usual.

Frank-Estelle sat at one of the tables and ate her chicken while her clothes were in the washer. She saw Moorman. He was sitting at one of the tables too. Even though her now-deceased husband used to call her “Ms. Nosy,” there was nothing about the man that struck her as unusual.

She was tending to her laundry in the far end of the laundromat when she heard what she said she couldn’t ignore. A scream.

“It was the woman’s demeanor and the type of scream that made me move,” she said. “I just took off running for her. There were others that were much closer to her that could’ve gotten there faster. I really don’t know what made me get there first.”

The screaming woman, who turned out to be Eileen’s mother, couldn’t move, Frank-Estelle said. She was just in shock, staring at something happening in the one-room women’s bathroom. Frank-Estelle couldn’t imagine what could be wrong.

She pushed her way into the bathroom and saw Moorman stabbing himself repeatedly in the chest, while the little girl — who at the time was crying but didn’t appear to be hurt — was sitting on the toilet.

Frank-Estelle’s first thought was to save the child from seeing something so horrific. She flung herself upon Moorman and turned his body away from Eileen so that Eileen could no longer see him.

Her next mission was to stop Moorman from stabbing himself.

“He was bound and determined to stab himself,” she said. “I finally pulled his hands away from his body. I was holding on for dear life at this point.”

She called for someone to call the police and an ambulance while trying to keep him from stabbing himself anymore.

While Frank-Estelle distracted the man, Glocar rushed to Eileen’s side.

She also heard the mother’s desperate pleas too.

“The mother was just screaming, saying, ‘My child. My child. Help my child,’ ” said Glocar, who speaks some Spanish but couldn’t keep up with everything the Spanish-speaking woman was saying. She was talking too fast.

“I guess it was just an instinct,” said Glocar, 38-year-old mother of two. “I had to get to her.”

Glocar said she had figured the little girl fell off the toilet and cut herself somehow. She laid the child on a folding table and started examining where she was hurt.

“I was holding her face with my hand,” she said. “I knew it was serious because she wasn’t bleeding out her wounds much. They looked deep and there was no bleeding. I know enough to know she was bleeding internally.”

The little girl didn’t want Glocar to touch her chest. She was complaining that she couldn’t breathe, and Glocar said she feared the child had punctured a lung.

“She was telling her mom she wanted to go home and that she was scared,” Glocar said. “You could see the panic in her little face. You could tell she was scared to death.”

Just feet away, Frank-Estelle had forced Moorman on his back and was using paper towels to apply pressure to his bleeding chest — whether he wanted it or not.

“You’re going to have to stay with me,” she told him. Blotting up blood that leaked through a T-shirt and a sweatshirt, she asked him all the questions she could think of. What’s your name? Where do you live? Who do you live with? What day is it?

He appeared to comprehend only half of what she was asking.

In the brief pause, she started wondering why she was there. It had been a normal night. And now she had tackled a man to the ground and put herself in danger.

“I started thinking, ‘This is stupid. This is stupid,’ ” she said. “ ‘Why am I here doing this?’ ”

“Here I am, trying to take care of me — and barely doing a good job of that. Why am I here?”

It was then that she heard it. The inescapable chatter around her. People saying he had hurt the little girl. Stabbed her. In the chest. Eileen was being pulled into an ambulance on a stretcher.

The thought that the scared little girl had been physically hurt hadn’t even occurred to Frank-Estelle.

Help arrived. The paramedics took Moorman away on a stretcher. It all happened so fast, but in other ways seemed to drag on.

Both Frank-Estelle and Glocar gave statements to the police.

And that was it.

People tried to explain it. But it was hard.

“It’s just a fluke,” said Greg Jones, the laundromat’s owner. “It’s one of those things. This store is my pride and joy, and this hurts. But there was nothing we could do.”

All Frank-Estelle and Glocar could do was finish their laundry, pack it up and go home.

Glocar knows she’ll never be the same again.

Frank-Estelle laughed when she thought of what her husband might say if he was still alive: “You can’t stay outta nobody’s business, can you, Ms. Nosy?”

She laughed at thinking how growing up with five brothers probably prepared her for that moment.

And how her 22-year-old daughter is going to make a T-shirt for her baby to wear that says, “My Gigi (grandmother) is a hero.”

But the laughter was often interrupted by her attempts to comprehend what had happened.

“I just acted,” she said. “I don’t know if I did the right thing. I just acted. I just hope somebody would do the same thing if it were me.

“It could’ve become a bad situation fast. He could’ve turned that ice pick on me. I could be a dead hero.”