By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
FIVE months after she was viciously stabbed and left for dead in her Endeavour Hills home, Ilona Prohaska is still too terrified to return.
The Hungarian grandmother, who has lived in Endeavour Hills for 35 years, had her throat cut by an intruder for $70 and a bank card but afterwards managed to claw her way through her Georgette Crescent house to contact paramedics using her emergency duress beeper.
After four weeks in hospital, with significant persisting injuries to her neck tendon, shoulder and arms and a permanent scar etched across her throat, the 73-year-old is now living in a nursing home where she is struggling with mounting costs.
She desperately wants to return home, but has vowed not to until a security door is installed.
“I’m too scared to come back home but I can’t let somebody put me out of my home, what I’ve worked for all my life,” Ms Prohaska said.
“If I have to die, I have to die at home.”
On Tuesday afternoon, 21 May, Ms Prohaska was expecting a visit from an insurance representative and opened her front door after she heard knocking.
“I opened the door a little bit and I looked outside and I said ‘Can I help you?’ and I look up and down and then I look in his hand and see a big knife,” Ms Prohaska said
“I went to quickly close the door and he marched faster and kicked the door and the door hit me on my head and I fly here (into the next room) where the tiles finish and I drop onto my bottom.”
The attacker took what little cash Ms Prohaska had in her purse along with a bank card, demanding the pin number and threatening her if she didn’t co-operate.
The assailant then took Ms Prohaska downstairs to the basement room where he stabbed her in the throat, leaving her unconscious on the floor before fleeing. When she came to, Ms Prohaska said the first thing she felt was hot water.
“I wake up downstairs and in my mind I’m feeling hot water but it’s not hot water, I’m lying down in my blood and that is warm. The next minute he’s (the attacker) coming into my mind.
“Then I was thinking I have to go for help.
“I want to stand up but I couldn’t, I turn over and I want to start climbing up. The next minute I hear the shutting of a door and I thought he’d left but I can’t see because my face is so swollen.”
With blood pouring from her neck and barely conscious, Ms Prohaska crawled step by step on her hands and knees up the basement stairs to her living room.
“The staircase is sharp and bruising and I have to climb it. Halfway I stop, that’s it; I couldn’t go any longer, my arms are very sore, (but) if I don’t go for help, I’ll be dead,” Ms Prohaska said.
“After that I forget that my arm feels sore and I’m not feeling it any more and I try to climb.”
Ms Prohaska remembered her duress alarm device, which the attacker had thrown into the front room. Summoning all her strength and suffering from impaired vision, Ms Prohaska crawled to the room and made her life-saving reach for the alarm device, pressing the button and contacting security services and paramedics via the intercom.
“After that he’s (paramedic) talking and talking and saying please talk to me and I pull all my energy together and he said ‘Are you all right?’ and I said ‘I’m not all right, somebody cut my throat’,” she said.
Police broke a window to bypass the front door which the assailant had locked and found Ms Prohaska clinging onto life, barely conscious on the floor. She was rushed to Dandenong Hospital where she stayed for a month.
Ms Prohaska’s neighbour, who had encouraged her to carry the emergency beeper and didn’t want to be named, said the attack had rocked Endeavour Hills.
“I used to go shopping and I’d leave the garage open with the tools and everything down there. I’d come back and there was no problem; we never had any problem around here,” the neighbour said.
“Now I always carry my keys around my neck.”
Detectives believe the attacker tried to use the stolen bank card at a Dandenong ATM on the corner of Lonsdale and Clow streets on the same afternoon of the attack.
A second man waiting to use the ATM around the same time could help police identify the attacker and has been urged to come forward.
A 32-year-old Hallam man was arrested in September over the attack and was released pending further inquiries, with the investigation still ongoing.
The attacker is described as Caucasian, in his thirties or forties and wearing a high-visibility jacket at the time.
Ms Prohaska thanked Narre Warren North MP Luke Donnellan for his assistance after the attack and for organising a security door which should be installed in the coming weeks.
Her neighbour said there was one thing for certain about Ms Prohaska.
“She’s a fighter. When something’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be,” the neighbour said.
“God didn’t want her upstairs yet.”
Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
