Five years later, target of machete attack hopes to inspire

PALMER — Not many people you meet in real life have catchphrases.

Elann “Lennie” Moren is one. If you’ve ever asked her how she’s doing you’ve heard it.

“Blessed and highly favored,” is her reply. Every single time.

Even after 17 surgeries and five years of physical therapy. Even despite the pain she feels every time she uses her right hand. She said she still considers herself blessed and highly favored.

More than five years ago in December 2007, Moren’s fiancé was killed and she was grievously injured when her fiancé’s son, Christopher Erin Rogers Jr., attacked them with a machete as they slept. Rogers stole his father’s truck and gun and drove to Anchorage where he shot three more people — killing one — before he was arrested.

“I lost so many words because of the brain damage,” Moren said Monday. “It’s frustrating when you used to have an ability and one of them was to express yourself, and now you have to struggle to find a word.”

But, she said, she’s still blessed and highly favored. Since the attack she’s become a step-grandmother. She has moved back to Palmer. She’s driving herself around. She’s working on a book.

“Life is wonderful, as long as I pay attention,” she said. “I’d like to thank everyone for their prayers. They worked.”

She was recently featured in an hour-long television program about the attack on the Discovery TV series “Alaska: Ice Cold Killers.”

She’s mostly ambivalent about that experience. The reenactments, she said, didn’t quite capture just how vulnerable she was before the attack — naked and in bed — nor how bloody and broken it left her.

But there were parts she liked, the ones that included things she hopes will be an inspiration to others — about how she didn’t feel she was alone in that bathroom after Rogers left, that there was some divine force lifting her up. That is the kind of inspiration she hopes to include in her book.

“I had help in that room and once the celestials were finished the medical people took over,” she said. “But then it was me learning how to live in this body and that has taken five years and it is still ongoing.”

Moren has what one might call an irrepressible sense of humor. In the hospital after the attack, she said, she was already telling jokes about it. But she also said shortly afterward that she didn’t want to be known as “The Machete Lady,” as some people had already dubbed her.

Now five years later, she’s come to embrace the machete lady moniker.

“I guess I hadn’t dealt with it psychologically,” she said. “Now that I’ve overcome so much I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.”

And machetes no longer scare her. She brought a rubber one to a party where the theme was bad taste. She said her costume beat out attendees dressed as both Sarah Palin and Joe Miller.

“I didn’t have to wear a costume or anything,” she said. “I think that was the turning point. At that point I had no problem being the machete lady.”

There are still some lingering problems. She and her son have both spent all the money they had, and then some. She still has to fight health care bureaucracies at every turn.

Her hand, which had been unusable but which a very kind doctor restored to her, hurts intensely whenever she uses it. She has tendonitis in an elbow that’s not really much of an elbow anymore.

But the toughest thing to deal with has been the post-traumatic stress disorder. She has a lot of trouble being in rooms with more than one conversation going at once or with people coming up behind her. She said it’s gotten worse over time, but her ability to overcome it has also greatly improved.

And while she doesn’t mind talking about the attack — for the television show she did a five-hour interview — there are some questions that still sting.

One in particular is the one everyone seems to ask — did Erin Rogers Jr. show any warning signs before he struck?

“I know they’re asking because of their own protection. They want to know if they can spot someone like that,” she said.

But, to a survivor like herself, it can almost feel like the old insensitive question people used to ask of rape survivors — “what were you wearing?” It seems to — inadvertently or not — shift some of the blame from the attacker to the survivor.

“It’s an irrelevant question,” Moren said.

There isn’t any way of understanding someone who would do the things Erin Rogers Jr. did, she said.

Today, as five years ago, she still feels strongly about the terms used to describe herself, her story. She spurns the title victim.

“If I’m a victim, I’m attached to him. If I’m a survivor, I stand alone,” she said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.