Dustin Kor doesn’t remember anything about the night he was attacked and beaten on Santa Barbara’s Eastside. When his friends discovered him lying in the street, unconscious and in a pool of his own blood, it was unclear what had happened or who had been involved. What was clear was that he had been savagely beaten and sustained severe injuries.

Kor, an amiable young project manager for a local contracting company, was attending a close friend’s birthday party on Nov. 20 of last year. He stepped out about 9:30 p.m. to make a trip to his truck — he doesn’t remember what for — and never came back. He has no recollection of what happened, but he was beaten so severely that he suffered a serious brain injury. During the scuffle that night, the alarm on his truck was triggered, and Kor says he thinks that’s what may have scared off whomever was behind the attack. The alarm also drew his friends out of the house.

The site of Kor’s attack, at Soledad and Carpinteria streets, is just blocks from where another beating, and subsequent murder, occurred last month. George Ied was walking home from work late at night when he was intercepted on Punta Gorda Street and also savagely beaten. He died in the hospital several days later, having never regained consciousness.

What prompted the attack on Ied remains under investigation, but Santa Barbara police believe that four men — all with known gang affiliations — are responsible. Another murder occurred in April, in which a local man was stabbed and bled to death at Arroyo Burro Beach, allegedly by a suspect with gang connections. Neither he nor Ied had any gang connection, according to police.

The attack on Kor is just as puzzling and senseless.

“Everybody who knows me has said, ‘Why would they do that?” he told Noozhawk. “It doesn’t make sense to anyone.”

Police responded that night to the scene on Carpinteria Street, but no witnesses have come forward, and Kor said he thinks the case is still open because police haven’t given him any information on what happened. In the days following the attack, no media picked up on the incident either.

“No one saw anybody,” he said, and though at this point there’s no way to prove the incident was gang-related, Kor said he feels the attack was too random — and brutal — not to be. Incidents have occurred on both sides of town that can be traced to “jumping in,” a gang initiation rite that often involves an attack on an unsuspecting person, and it’s possible Kor can be counted among those victims.

After the attack, Kor was unconscious for about a week. The first memories for him don’t surface until nearly a month after the attack, on his last day of rehabilitation at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. His mother moved up from San Diego to stay with him as he recovered, and Kor discovered he needed to relearn simple skills such as basic math and reading.

He spent the next month at Solutions Rehabilitation Institute, which provides a live-in approach to rehab, allowing Kor to relearn how to do things such as cook for himself.

“I’m so thankful to them,” he said. “The help that I had to get back was incredible.”

For Kor, coping with the fact that his responses aren’t as quick as before the accident has been difficult, but his progress is marked. A year later, he’s just now starting to feel like life is getting back to normal, and he’s even seeing a psychologist experienced in helping soldiers recover after incidents of trauma. He said just being able to talk to someone about the challenges of brain injury, of which much is unknown, has been important.

“That’s been huge for me to get past this,” Kor said. “It took about six months before I could really even grasp what had happened to me. In some ways, I wish I had just crashed on my bike, and then we could say, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t have taken that turn so fast.’ I would love to have something to point my finger at and say, ‘That’s why it happened.’”

But there isn’t — at least not yet — and Kor has had to find his own way to cope. He said he isn’t afraid of being attacked again, but that he’s much more cautious now. For him, the fear of a second brain injury, and the catastrophic effects it could have, kept him from one of his first loves: cycling.

An avid cyclist before the accident, Kor had ridden in several Century events, which are cycling courses of 100 miles. He finished one just a few weeks before the attack, and “that was one of the big things, when I got hurt, that I knew I couldn’t do for a while,” he said. “That was a big loss for me.”

Doctors told him to stay away from biking as he recovered, and he was scared to even ride at all for a long time, he said. That changed two months ago, when Kor was cleared by his physician to start riding again. He decided to ride in the Metric Century locally on Oct. 23, although he hadn’t trained or planned for it.

But Kor said he knew he was ready, mentally, to face the road again.

He started the race with a half-dozen friends. While they went on ahead to complete the 100-mile race, Kor was on his own to finish the rest of the shorter, 62-mile course. His inner dialogue on that last part of the race was divided between second guessing whether he could make it and pressing on toward the finish — which he did.

“Elation” is how he described crossing the finish line.

“It was at that moment I realized, ‘I’m going to be back to the way I used to be,’” he said.

After months of being afraid that he would never accomplish a full recovery, the finish was packed with significance for Kor.

“It was probably one of the biggest rides I’ve done, because it meant so much to me,” he said.

While he continues to improve every day, he said he has concerns about the violence that Santa Barbara has seen and for the safety of others.

When Kor heard about Ied’s murder, he said he was frustrated that it had come to that point in Santa Barbara. His own attack was something he said he never considered.

“It’s dangerous, and bad things can happen to people who have no gang affiliation and are just walking to their house,” he said. “This isn’t the happy-go-lucky Santa Barbara that people think it is. There are some problem areas.”

He said he’s supportive of the idea of a gang injunction in the city, “because it’s gotten that bad.” He also expressed concern that officials may have a tendency to preserve Santa Barbara’s glossy, attractive surface, instead of exposing attacks such as his.

“But at some point,” he said, “you have to realize that it is that dangerous.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @laraanncooper or @NoozhawkNews. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.