GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (PIX11) -- Lisa Combatti never wanted the violent events of Dec. 7, 1993, to define her life, so she sometimes—defiantly—took the 5:33 p.m. train from Penn Station on the anniversary of a gunman's attack that nearly killed her and her unborn child.

"The 5:33 didn't stop existing until this year," Combatti observed, "when they started running trains through Grand Central and Penn Station. They revised the schedule, and the 5:33 was no longer. And that was like closure to me."

Exactly 30 years ago, Combatti was seven and a half months pregnant with her first child and riding the third car on the 5:33 to Hicksville. The train had just left New Hyde Park, and her stop—Merillon Avenue in Garden City—was next.

"The doors closed, and I heard this popping sound," Combatti, now 63, recalled. "I thought maybe it was a car backfiring, so I looked out the window, and that wasn't it. I looked behind me, and I saw Colin Ferguson coming down the aisle, just shooting left to right, right to left."

Ferguson, a clean-cut, unemployed immigrant from Kingston, Jamaica, was fired with a 9mm Ruger. He had a manifesto of grievances against Adelphi University and the Workman's Compensation Board.

"I tried to get towards the second car," Combatti said, "but they had locked the doors, people backed up."

Combatti tried another option.

"I got in the vestibule where the doors open, and I got myself in the fetal position, trying to protect the baby," Combatti remembered. "And that's where I was when I was shot, and also, Maria Magtoto was right next to me, and she was killed."

Magtoto, an immigrant from the Philippines, was one of six passengers executed in LIRR car number three.

"I looked down at her, and I said, 'Oh my God, she's so beautiful.' And she was dead. I knew she was dead."

Dennis McCarthy, 52, of Mineola, was also killed, while his son, Kevin—who was sitting beside him—sustained severe brain injuries. James Gorycki, Amy Federici, Mi Kyung Kim, and Richard Nettleton were the other victims who didn't make it home that night.

The wife of another man told PIX11 News on the scene that night in 1993 that her husband was saved by another passenger who stumbled into him.

"He got down, and somebody came on top of him," the woman told us at the train station during the emergency response in 1993. "And that's why he survived. The person on top of him was shot."

Combatti told PIX11 News seven passengers put their coats over her as she waited outside for an ambulance.

"And I was, you know, rubbing my stomach and asking the baby to kick for me," Combatti said, "and she was a trooper because she kicked for me and, at that point, I think that's what calmed me down."

Combatti said an X-ray showed where the bullet was located.

"The next night, we did operate, and they removed the bullet, which was a half inch from my rectum," Combatti recalled. "There was like an X-ray where you could see my spine and the baby's spine."

She told PIX11 News about weekly "group therapy" sessions with the other survivors, where "we just talked about where we were all sitting."

Colin Ferguson's lawyers, William Kunstler and Ron Kuby were initially planning a defense of "black rage." When Ferguson gave his first interview to PIX11 News, six months after the shooting, he was cagey about whether he was in the LIRR car that night.

"Absolutely, it is a tragedy," Ferguson said as he went on to complain about his treatment in the Nassau County Jail.

He claimed he was going blind in his left eye after "four Caucasians and one Hispanic inmate jumped me."

Ferguson said he had been judged and convicted already.

"My sense of justice is a sense of justice that is almost without blemish," Ferguson declared.

Yet a year after the shooting, Ferguson was attending a mental competency hearing, his lawyers claiming he wasn't fit for trial. Ferguson decided to fire Kunstler and Kuby and defend himself.

"Why should we have this circus here?" Kuby asked during the hearings. "Why should we have the spectacle of a crazy man defending himself?"

Yet that's exactly what Ferguson went on to do, cross-examining the shooting survivors during the murder and attempted murder trial in early 1995.

"I remember him asking me, 'Do you know who shot you?' Combatti told us, (replying), "'Yes! You shot me!'"

Ferguson was convicted of six murders and nineteen attempted murders yet acquitted of civil rights violations. He received a sentence of more than three hundred years in prison.

And Ferguson's evil act inspired others to action.

Amy Federici's parents donated her heart and kidneys to needy recipients.

Carolyn McCarthy, widow of Dennis, and Joyce Gorycki, James' widow, became strong gun control advocates. McCarthy later entered politics and served 18 years in the House of Representatives until her retirement in 2015.

McCarthy's son, Kevin, eventually married and is the father of two children.

Lisa Combatti had her baby girl, Kim, in February 1994.

She used a leg brace and a walker when she brought the infant home from the hospital.

Combatti also raised a son, Daniel.

She has thrived as a mother and wife and in her job at Deutsche Bank.

But Combatti is deeply troubled that gun laws never significantly changed.

"When Sandy Hook happened, I thought for sure there'd be some sort of changes," Combatti said, referring to the 2012 elementary school shooting in Connecticut that left twenty-first graders and six staff members dead. "Nothing. How can you get more innocent than those children? They were on Dec. 14, and we're on the seventh," she noted of the anniversary dates.

Combatti is grateful her life has come full circle thirty years after the shooting.

"The reason I was going home on that train that night was that I was going to pick out her layette," Combatti said of her firstborn, Kim.

The proud mom is planning her daughter's wedding for next May.