Lafayette Square lightning strike survivor shares her story

“I just remember reading an article and being like, ‘There is no way,’ ” she said in an interview Tuesday with The Washington Post. “But then I looked at photos of the older couple.”

Officials say Escudero-Kontostathis had ended up huddled with the couple — Donna Mueller, 75, and James Mueller, 76 — and 29-year-old Brooks A. Lambertson, a bank official in town from Los Angeles, as a storm rolled in on Aug. 4. But Escudero-Kontostathis said her last memory was talking with the Muellers, who were in D.C. to celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary, earlier that day.

Strangers huddled together under a tree. Then lightning struck.

Escudero-Kontostathis approached them as part of her work with the International Rescue Committee, canvassing the area for donations to help refugees in Ukraine. They bonded over the Muellers’ home state of Wisconsin, where Escudero-Kontostathis had recently traveled for a family reunion, and the joys of visiting the Green Bay Packers stadium, Escudero-Kontostathis recalled.

She recommended that they check out the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Planet Word while in D.C.

The next thing she knew, Escudero-Kontostathis said, she was lying in a hospital bed, with IVs puncturing her body. A picture of the Muellers was now flashing on her iPad. They were killed, the article said. Somehow, she was still alive.

In the days since lightning struck at Lafayette Square, Escudero-Kontostathis has learned to live with second-degree burns down her left side that feel like “10,000 grains of sand are trying to get through each pore at the same time.” But the guilt of surviving the lightning strike that killed the Muellers and Lambertson haunts her.

Escudero-Kontostathis said she cannot remember the minutes before the strike, but she worries that she motioned for the Muellers to join her under a tree to seek shelter from the rain.

“My biggest fear is that I called back out to them,” she said. “I couldn’t live with myself if that’s the case. It’s my biggest fear, that it’s because I wanted to say ‘Hi’ one more time before they left.”

She feels similar pangs about Lambertson, a vice president at City National Bank. Escudero-Kontostathis said she does not recall interacting with him that day, but she has since learned that they share mutual friends from California.

“I have this guilt of, ‘Why did I make it?’ ” she said. “I try to calm myself with gratitude of, ‘Well, I did, so I’m not going to waste it.’ ”

The four victims of the lightning strike were brought together by happenstance — three out-of-towners and Escudero-Kontostathis, standing together not far from…