Tenacity keeps Mounce going after shooting

Abigail Mounce calls herself persistent.

It’s that quality, she said, that motivated her to return to work and re-enroll in school only three months after she was shot in the face by her neighbor. And it was the same determined nature that pushed her through the moments of exhaustion in that last term, helping her graduate with her bachelor’s degree in May.

“I don’t let anything stop me,” she said.

Mounce, 34, was six weeks from graduating from Washington State University’s online program when, on the morning of Oct. 31, she and her husband, Erich, came under gunfire. The couple were sitting in their car at a red light at Northeast 63rd Street and Andresen Road, just a half-mile from their home, when shots erupted from the car next to them.

The man who squeezed the trigger was their next-door neighbor, John Kendall, with whom the Mounces had been in a yearslong legal feud. The primary source of tension was that Kendall had as many as five tenants and a home business in his home, which violated subdivision restrictions, the Mounces said.

Kendall was due in court on Oct. 31 for the case. After a countywide manhunt, Kendall was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that day.

In the hectic moments following the shooting, Erich raced his wife to the hospital. Once there, they learned that none of the bullet fragments in Abigail’s brain had damaged her cognition. The gunfire did, however, shatter her cheek, and cut her eye and ear in half.

Half of her face, Erich said, “looked like hamburger that came out of a grinder.” But, he said, “I’m just glad that she recovered, and I didn’t lose her.”

Abigail spent about a week in the hospital and underwent facial reconstructive surgery. Doctors recreated her cheek with metal plates and skin grafts. Doctors reattached her ear, but the damage left her with only 60 percent of her hearing in her right ear. Doctors eventually fitted her with a prosthetic right eye, leaving her with sight only from her left eye. She had a second surgery on her eyelid about a week ago.

For about three months after the shooting, the couple stayed at home and rested. They worked through the trauma of the shooting, talking about what happened when they wanted to and remaining silent when it was needed. They left the house to run errands and to do laps around Westfield Vancouver mall to help with Abigail’s walking, since the damage to her ear had impaired her balance.

But when the new year rolled around, Abigail thought about the degree she had been so close to attaining.

She signed up for four classes — the amount she needed to get her degree — and eventually went back to her job at SEH America, where she worked the graveyard shift as a production technician for the silicon wafer manufacturer.

“I couldn’t believe she went back to that routine,” Erich said. “I was concerned she was pushing herself too hard. … I didn’t want her to collapse, so to speak, from exhaustion or have it prevent her from recovering.”

The couple said they argued about the issue, but Abigail insisted she could do it. And by averaging five to six hours of sleep, she did.

“There was one point, maybe toward the end around finals, where I thought, this may have been too much for me,” Abigail said. “But I did it. I got straight A’s.”

Having worked at SEH America since graduating high school, Abigail completed the degree in management information systems in hopes of advancing in the company. With her degree, Mounce has applied for a higher-level job and is hopeful that she’ll get it. But if she doesn’t, she said, that won’t hold her back.

“Like I said, I’m a very persistent person,” she said.