This story by the Bozeman Chronicle’s Gail Schontzler reads like something out of a crime novel — except that it’s true.
Promethea Pythaitha, daughter of Georgia Smith, locks the gate at the entrance of her Livingston home Feb. 9. Smith was shot last January and credits the gate with saving her life as the assailant was unable to get close enough to fatally shoot her. (Photo by SEAN SPERRY/Bozeman Chronicle)
LIVINGSTON – She lay on the cold ground, crumpled and bleeding and defenseless, as bullet after bullet hit her body.
Georgia Smith felt each bullet like the jolt of an electric shock.
The man with the gun, just a few feet away, shot her five times.
“I asked God to let me die, because it hurt so much,” Smith recalled, tears in her eyes. “Let me die, or take this dark terror away.”
Thomas Kyros, 81, had traveled thousands of miles from his home in Florida to this windswept Montana hillside with stunning views of the Crazy Mountains.
Kyros, a retired Greek-American who said he had worked in experimental physics at Columbia University, was obsessed. He was obsessed with Smith’s daughter, 19-year-old Promethea Pythaitha, a young genius who had learned calculus at 7 and became at age 14 the youngest person ever to graduate from Montana State University.
Continue reading Obsession with teenage Montana genius leads to tragedy