Ariz. shooting victim is Oceanside High grad

A day after a gunman opened fire on a congresswoman's meet-and-greet in Arizona, Wilson Hileman left this message on his brother Charles' answering machine: "Suzi was in the event in Tucson. . . . Suzi was shot. . . . It's pretty darn serious."

Wilson Hileman's wife, Susan, a 1969 graduate of Oceanside High School, was as unlikely a target as Christina Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl she had brought to the gathering Saturday morning. The youngster was among the six dead. Susan Hileman and 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), were wounded.

"It's going to be a long time for recovery," said her brother-in-law, Charles Hileman of Rocky River, Ohio. "She's going to have to deal with the death of this child. . . . How do you deal with something like that?"

Marian Thurm, a novelist who lives in New York City and a high school classmate of Susan Annis Hileman, spoke with the wounded woman's husband Monday by phone. "He said she was in a lot of pain, and was scheduled for surgery Wednesday for her shattered hip," Thurm said.

And, she said, Wilson Hileman told her that both the mother and father of the slain girl reached out to his wife to "reassure and comfort her."

Susan Hileman is 58, a retired psychologist, master gardener, mother of two and a blogger who describes her writing as "a domestic goddess's musings on her world."

She is, said her brother, Jeff Annis, of a suburb outside of Washington, D.C., "exactly the kind of person you'd want to take your daughter to meet your congresswoman at the mall."

They were next in line to greet Giffords when the gunman opened fire. Hileman was shot in her chest, stomach, hip and leg, and is in "serious condition," her brother-in-law said.

Hileman was an honor student at Oceanside High, said Annis, going on to Cornell for college, where she met her husband. They married in 1973 at her family's Oceanside home.

She went on to a career in social work, working as a grief counselor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and they lived for a time in Chicago. His career in finance took them to San Francisco and retirement landed them in Tucson, but she kept her ties to Long Island, returning in the fall of 2009 for her 40th high school reunion.

Photos from the reunion show a petite woman with salt-and-pepper hair smiling and hugging her friends.

"She's a delightful, bubbly sort of person," said Annis, who last saw his sister last summer and just got a care package in the mail from her on Friday: some onions from her garden.

"She was trying to grow tomatoes," he said. "You can't do that in the desert, Suzi - but they were there, in a really small pot on the back porch."

Wilson Hileman, reached Monday afternoon at the Tucson hospital where his wife is being treated, sounded like a man who had not slept in two days. "Suzi's going to be OK," he said.

With Carol Polsky