"You might as well stay positive. There's no sense in feeling bad for yourself," Evelyn Bunte told KTVT-TV.
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Bunte's family is celebrating the small victories as she recovers from an attack that took her sight and partially paralyzed her but could not rob her of her optimism.
According to her father Victor Raga, the fact that Bunte is laughing, talking and re-gaining motor skills is nothing short of a miracle.
Raga says his daughter moved to Fort Worth from their native Illinois over the summer.
"She bought her plane ticket, she came to me and said, 'Dad, I'm going,'" he recalls.
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Since her arrival in Texas, Bunte was working and planing on starting community college during the spring semester.
Police say that an unidentified person or people made their way into Evelyn's boyfriend's east Fort Worth home as she slept.
"They shot her three times in the head. They found glass in her scalp. She fought back and that's when it escalated. She just wouldn't die. She fought," Raga said.
Police don't know why Bunte was attacked, but they believe the incident was not random. No arrests have been made yet.