The call came while Kitty Iwa­moto was shopping at Longs. Her son, Nicholas, was on the line. He told her not to worry and please don’t be upset, but he had been in a car accident and was on his way to the emergency room in an ambulance. Could she come get him?

As she rode TheBus to the Queen’s Medical Center in May, Kitty Iwa­moto tried to focus hard on the positive.

"I just kept saying, ‘He’s going to be OK, he’s going to be OK, he’s going to be OK,’" she recalled. "It was very difficult, especially when he said, ‘I heard something happen in my neck.’"

His neck. There is no greater worry in Kitty’s life, no greater fear for her son Nicholas, than the health of his neck. They have lived with this reality for 31⁄2 years.

Iwamoto was the young man with the halo bolted to his skull — a circular metal brace that held his broken neck together so it might heal after a random act of violence.

On Feb. 1, 2009, Iwa­­moto was attacked at the summit of Koko Crater. He was stabbed multiple times and thrown from the rim. He was so busted up that the Hono­lulu firefighters who rescued him thought he was a goner. When he walked into their Pawaa station months later, they teared up.

But in living, Iwa­moto discovered the curse of survival.

Recovery tested his optimism with chronic pain, periods of self-doubt and unbelievable bad luck: He was rear-ended in two separate auto accidents that whipped his head like a rag doll.

Iwamoto has had eight surgeries. He’s coughed up blood. His head hurts when he opens his mouth. Twice he came down with double pneumonia. A year ago he suffered a seizure while playing a video game and fell face forward onto the edge of his computer table, jarring his neck and opening a huge gash on his head.

"If I didn’t think my life had purpose and everything happened for a reason and it was a miracle that I survived, I would have died a long time ago," the 26-year-old Iwamoto said. "The hopelessness and the despair would have been too much."

The car accident May 15 on Pali Highway was perhaps the worst moment since the attack. Just as his life was returning to something resembling normal, the crash sent him into a tailspin.

Iwamoto had been hired that day by a Kaimuki restaurant and was scheduled to start that evening. He didn’t need a neck brace and was learning to live with the remnant pain. He was moving on with his life, and his mother was optimistic.

"It was like coming out of the dark and finally there is going to be light," Kitty said. "He was going to have a life. Maybe I was going to have a life."

Heading over the Pali toward Kailua, Iwa­moto slowed at a yellow light. He saw a police officer giving someone a ticket and in that instant was slammed from behind. His Mazda Protege, the car with the metallic-orange paint scheme all his friends raved about, was now a wreck.

"My first thought was, ‘OK, I think I’m alive, but what about my neck now?’ It hurt pretty bad. Imagine getting whiplash when you’ve already broken your neck."

His fingers started to tingle — again, a sign of nerve damage.

Later, after he got home, the officer at the scene called to explain how distraught the other driver was after learning whom she had hit.

"The accident really set me back and left me more in doubt about my future," Iwamoto said. "Not, Will I live? but, Can I work? If I stand for 10 minutes, I am in pain. I can walk around and be active, but certain things make the pain unbearable."

After the accident in May, he decided he needed a break from Hawaii and traveled to Boise, Idaho, to stay with friends. After two months he came home. It was like starting all over.

"God definitely has a sense of humor," he said.

IWAMOTO had gone to Koko Crater on a whim. He wanted to test his fitness as he prepared to enlist in the Hawaii National Guard. But as he reached the steel platform at the summit, his heart was pounding so hard, it scared him.

Almost immediately, Benjamin Davis came at him, shouting, accusing, talking nonsense.

"Right when I saw the knife, he stabbed me," Iwa­moto said.

The blows rained down, 18 times, striking his stomach, liver, diaphragm and left lung. An artery in his left temple was severed and his jugular nicked. Two tendons in his right hand were also cut clean through.

"I turned and I ran, but there was nowhere to run to," Iwa­moto said. "I wasn’t going to stay there and die. I ran and tripped, and that’s when he jumped on top of me and he went for my head and throat. He stabbed me three times in the throat. All I could do was shield my face."

Iwamoto grabbed Davis by the groin, squeezed as hard as he could, and the stabbing ended. Davis responded by throwing Iwa­moto into a ravine below the crater rim.

He fell 30 feet, landed on his head and rolled another 70 feet, his plunge halted only when one of his legs caught on a piece of rebar. The fall broke his neck and right ankle and fractured his skull.

Iwamoto thinks he was unconscious for half an hour. When he came to, there was so much blood in his mouth, he began to choke. Each time he yelled for help, blood gushed from his chest.

"I thought, ‘This is it, I am going to die,’" Iwa­moto said.

But he didn’t. Firefighters airlifted him to safety.

He was taken to the Queen’s Medical Center and spent a month there recovering from the most life-threatening of his injuries. He learned to breathe again after his lungs were cleared of dirt and fluid, and he had to learn to walk again, too. Still, he emerged optimistic.

Then, six months later, he needed more surgery to fuse two vertebrae. And there was no guarantee it would work.

His emotional recovery was just as difficult. For a long time, Iwa­moto lived in fear that Davis would somehow find him and attack again.

"Nicholas was terrified," his 62-year-old mother said. "He wouldn’t let me answer the door if we hadn’t ordered pizza."

He saw a mental health therapist nearly every week for three years, but he didn’t want to talk much beyond that.

"Nicholas didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything," she said. "He went through a couple of years of being a hermit. He had a really hard time thinking he could live his life again. It was hard on both of us."

KITTY Iwamoto was having her own troubles coping with what happened. She would get physically sick when she looked at Koko Crater. Once, while riding to an Easter brunch in Hawaii Kai, she started to sob when the car sped past the crater.

She had become her son’s caregiver, which meant she couldn’t take a full-time job. The two of them shared a studio apartment in Waikiki, and she slept on the floor, but they’ve also had to move three times, including once after an apartment in Makiki was flooded by broken pipes in the unit above. Finances were tight.

"We went through my savings," Kitty said.

She had been strong for so many years that this seemed out of place.

Kitty had raised her three children — two girls and Nicholas, her youngest — after getting a divorce in 1990 and moving to San Jose, Calif. She beat colon cancer, too.

Even before her son was attacked, she was preparing to relocate to Oahu, where Nicholas had taken courses at the University of Hawaii and Kapiolani Community College before choosing to join the Hawaii National Guard.

There have been so many setbacks that at times their lives felt out of control. Like the time in January 2010 when they were driving home from a meeting at the Hono­lulu prosecutor’s office and they were rear-ended. They were still reeling with the news that Davis would be acquitted by reason of insanity when they were hit, said Kitty, who was driving that day.

"We were just going up Ward Avenue, and we were parked at a red light and somebody wasn’t paying attention and hit the back of the car," she said. "It wasn’t a total wreck or anything, but it caused a lot of whiplash type of pain."

DURING the past 12 months or so, Nicholas has slowly emerged from his personal exile. He has begun driving regularly, something initially thought impossible. Nicholas has even tried to play golf, a sport he had excelled at during high school. He always hurts the next day, though. He’s thought about returning to college and studying to become a history teacher — if he can find a way to pay for it.

"I was in my room for three years, and I did a lot of learning," he said. "At some point I realized you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself."

The restaurant job Nicholas landed in May loomed large as a personal benchmark toward a normal life. But even though X-rays after his accident determined that his vertebrae had finally fused, it’s hard to view that as a silver lining.

"I am pretty much always in pain," he said. "In terms of alleviating it, painkillers work, but I am not on them now. Painkillers are bad. They help, but to have to take a pill just because you are in pain is not pleasant. So I have learned to live with the pain as best as I can."

Nicholas returned to Hawaii last week, in part because he always meant to but also because of a recent court ruling that allows Davis — who is in the custody of the Hawaii State Hospital — to attend Windward Community College classes. Initially, Davis was to be allowed to attend without an escort, but state officials decided last week to require one.

The news that her son’s attacker would be out in public was especially troubling for Kitty Iwa­moto, and while Nicholas doesn’t fear for his mother’s safety, he knew she needed his support.

"I didn’t want her to be here alone," he said.

He came back with his renewed optimism intact. Ever since the attack, Nicholas has found strength in the hundreds of letters from people he’ll never meet and hugs from strangers on the street. He’s grateful and often shares how it could have been so much worse — how others have it even worse.

None of that has changed. Nor has the one fact that trumps all that has happened to him.

"I want people to know what I have been through since the stabbing, but I want it to be optimistic," he said. "I am still here."