Injured Abortion-Clinic Nurse Poses Questions for Bomber

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. —  A tear streamed down Emily Lyons’ scarred right cheek from her remaining eye, closed tightly against the bright lights. She held up her right hand, mangled and red.

Four weeks after nearly dying in an abortion-clinic bombing that killed an off-duty police officer, Lyons quietly posed questions for the bomber whose homemade handiwork ripped apart her body.

“What were you thinking?” Lyons, a clinic nurse, said from her wheelchair Monday. “Did you really feel that this would change something?”

Without pausing, she provided her own answer.

“The clinics will continue to stay open, the employees will continue to work, the patients will continue to come,” she said. “I want everyone to know--this person survives.”

The 41-year-old woman spoke publicly about the bombing for the first time Monday, talking to a room filled with reporters and cameras at the hospital where she has been recovering since the explosion Jan. 29.

A bomb filled with nails exploded as she and Officer Robert Sanderson, who moonlighted as a security guard, arrived for work that day, sending shrapnel into her body and killing him. Lyons was taken to a nearby hospital, where a string of operations saved her life.

Her left eye gone and her right eye only able to detect light, Lyons said the hardest part of her ordeal has been not seeing her husband, children and the people caring for her.

Authorities are still trying to find Eric Robert Rudolph, the 31-year-old North Carolina man suspected of bombing the clinic.