You can call her a lot of things: tough, feisty, determined, resourceful. But don’t call her a victim.

“Not in the slightest,” Catherine Russo said in her Scottish brogue. “If you think for one minute that one cowardly, deranged man can change my life, then you’re mistaken.”

Speaking by telephone earlier this week, the 73-year-old survivor talked about the brutal attack at a Citadel Road restaurant that nearly claimed her life.

Click here to listen to a portion of the interview.

Last Sunday at about 1:30 p.m., Russo was walking to her car parked in the Cracker Barrel parking lot when a man wielding a knife attacked her, stabbing her multiple times as she fought back.

After the assault, several restaurant patrons and even a dishwasher took off after the man, nabbing him a short distance away.

Police charged 28-year-old Teddy Sanders with attacking Russo. At his bond hearing Tuesday, Sanders said he may be suffering from a mental illness.

Russo didn’t buy it.

“Oh, bollocks! Mental illness, my Scottish backside!” Russo said. “He is a walking psychopath. He was out to commit murder, there’s no doubt in my mind. No doubt.”

A resident of Florida, Russo was in Orangeburg Sunday to have lunch before continuing her annual trip to New York to visit with family. She planned to spend time with her three grandchildren for most of the summer.

Part of that trip included a stop at the Cracker Barrel, where she has stopped every year for the past decade. Never had a problem, she said.

Then came Sunday.

“I went to get lunch,” she said. “I always stop there. I’m careful, I don’t just stop anywhere.”

As she walked to her car, she saw no one around. Then suddenly, she was confronted by a male.

“He must have been hiding in front of the car or somewhere,” Russo said. “He evidently singled me out.”

The attacker didn’t immediately grab for Russo’s purse.

“At that point, he was hitting my head,” she said. “He was fighting with me, stabbing me in the head. When I saw that knife ... he didn’t want the bag, he wanted to kill somebody.”

Russo said she was at a distinct disadvantage. Her refusal to give him the purse left her with only one hand to fend him off. Otherwise, she said, her attacker would have been in dire trouble.

“I can blame that on my Scottish ancestry,” she said. “I punched him. When I saw that knife, I lost my temper.”

But with only a left jab and a temper, Russo was losing the fight. She fears she could have lost her life.

Stabbed more than 20 times and suffering from several fractured ribs from being punched, Russo began losing consciousness.

Inside the Cracker Barrel, several patrons noticed the battle going on in the parking lot between a male and a woman with fiery red hair. At least two men, a woman and even a dishwasher from the back ran out to aid Russo, who by this time had fallen.

One man and the woman went to aid Russo while the other man and the dishwasher ran after her attacker.

Drifting between consciousness and black, bleeding from dozens of wounds, Russo recalls a woman named “Gail” holding her hand.

Meantime, the two men chasing the attacker caught him in a nearby field. He began biting one of the men on the leg.

Bond was set on Sanders Tuesday at $750,000. He was charged with armed robbery, assault and battery with intent to kill and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a crime.

In 2003, Sanders was charged and later sentenced to two years for breaking into the homes of two women at an Orangeburg-area community for the elderly.

After hearing of the 2003 charges, the feisty Scot had scathing words for Sanders.

“I can’t think of a bad enough name to call him,” she said. “He’s a coward. He’s going around preying on elderly women.”

Russo’s son, Frank Russo, flew down from New York to accompany his mother on the rest of the journey after she was released from the hospital on Monday.

“If it wasn’t for them,” Frank Russo said of his mother’s guardians, “I truly believe she would have been killed. I mean, he stabbed her 20 times, she’s got cuts all over. That’s just animalistic.”

Russo credits her surviving the nightmarish assault to her descending from the Campbells and MacPhersons. That, and the help rendered her by the several Good Samaritans who came to her aid.

“I can’t thank them enough,” she said. “They’re my heroes.”

When she makes her return trip in a few months, Russo hopes she can meet with those who helped her. From the sheriff’s office, to the Cracker Barrel staff, to the Good Samaritans, she wants to thank each one personally for actions she says saved her life.

“I would really like to meet with them in September,” she said. “Would you please tell them how much I appreciate them? They definitely saved my life. I would have been dead.”

With his mother planning to remain independent, traveling as she wishes, does her son worry more?

“I don’t think I do,” Frank Russo said. “I probably will, but I think she learned a lesson from this as well.”

Perhaps if she gave him the purse, the hitting and the stabbing would have stopped. But Catherine Russo said that’s not the point. The months of anticipated recuperation is immaterial. It was the principle of honesty and right and wrong that mattered, she said.

“I’ve still got the bag,” Russo said. “He wasn’t going to get it.”

T&D Staff Writer Richard Walker can be reached by e-mail at rwalker@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5516.

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