The face of the approaching young man was friendly and smiling on the day in April 1976, as Wendy Savino sat in her car in New York City.
“Very handsome, walking towards me, smiling,” Savino recalled. She locked the doors to stay safe, noticing his blue eyes.
Savino thought the man might knock on the window and ask for directions. “And it didn’t seem scary at all,” she said.
“He is smiling. Then my chest exploded. The first bullet came in here and my lungs exploded,” Savino said on “Top Story with Tom Llamas.”
Savino was recently confirmed by the New York Police Department as the first victim of notorious “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz, whose reign of terror spanned from 1976 to July 1977.
Sitting in her car in Queens, Savino was shot five times but survived, although she lost her right eye.
Berkowitz, also known as the “.44 caliber killer,” was arrested on August 10, 1977 and later sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to six murders. Seven people were injured.
Berkowitz shot Savino three times first and then twice more in the back, she said. Savino remembers hearing Berkowitz laughing.
She pretended to be dead.
“Where can I go? So I just stood there. And the parking lot was gravel. And I hear your footsteps moving away, moving away from me,” Savino said. “When I don’t hear your footsteps anymore, I get up, open the door. door and roll on the gravel.”
Savino managed to get to a restaurant, where he got help. She then spent two months in intensive care.
The NYPD recently went to her home and confirmed that she was the first victim of the “Son of Sam” killer.
Savino credits Manny Grossman, who runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the serial killings and who obtained all the police records tied to the Berkowitz cases.
“And he went through them. And he found my sketch in Donna Lauria’s file,” Savino said. Lauria, 18, was the first person Berkowitz killed.
Berkowitz is serving his sentence at Shawangunk Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Ulster County, New York. He is eligible for parole but has been denied — most recently last month, according to the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
Savino said that if he could say anything to Berkowitz, “I would call him a rotten bastard.”
“I’m so angry at him,” she said.
“How dare you? How dare he? I mean, he ruined my life. I’ve been in the theater before. I was a contortionist. I was a trapeze artist,” Savino said. She said Berkowitz took that from her.
Savino said after a shooting like hers or any other traumatic event, the lesson is to stay strong and maintain hope.
“I suppose there is always hope, that you have to be strong, be positive,” Savino said. “If you become negative – even if it’s just through an injury or surgery – if you’re unhappy or negative, if you don’t want to get up, you need to be positive and believe that you can do this.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
