RALEIGH - As if wounds or grief were not enough, the victims of violent crimes are often left with medical bills and other expenses they can't pay. Thousands of them seek help each year from a little known and chronically underfunded state agency. The N.C. Victims Compensation Commission gets more requests for payments -- to ambulance services, hospitals, doctors and funeral homes -- than it can fill.

For the year ending last June, the commission had a budget of just under $9.5 million. From that, it paid outstanding claims from the year before, and an additional $7.3 million in new demands. It ended the year with hundreds of unpaid claims.

The commission is often the last hope for people like Shequitta Crudup, who carries the dark, ropey scars across her slender neck and shoulders from the night last June that a stranger came at her across a parking lot, arms whirling like helicopter blades, and slashed her with a box cutter.

Nearly every day, there's another collection letter on the $17,779 it cost to sew Crudup back together after the attack.

"I ask myself, 'How am I going to pay this?' " Crudup said. A 2004 graduate of Millbrook High School, she has rent, car and insurance payments to make on $8.75 an hour.

The commission was formed in 1985 by an act of the legislature, but didn't get its first appropriation -- $1 million -- until 1987. It relies on annual appropriations from the General Assembly, along with a 60 percent federal match. It also receives money from concessions inside the state's prisons, such as the sale of candy bars to inmates.

Gov. Mike Easley, a former prosecutor, has repeatedly requested more money for the commission. Even with caps on reimbursements, though, the commission comes up short every year, says executive director Janice Carmichael.

"Look at who we're helping," said Carmichael, who leads a staff of about a dozen. "These victims are your most at-risk North Carolinians."

Every state has a similar agency, and Carmichael says most are funded by fees and fines paid by people convicted of criminal acts.

"Those states never run out of money," she said. "We run out of money every year."

Carmichael's staff handles 2,500 to 3,500 claims a year, investigating each to assure the victim meets eligibility standards. The staff summarizes each case and recommends approval or denial. Once a quarter, seven appointed, unpaid commissioners meet and vote on whether to pay the claims.

A.A. "Dick" Adams, the commission's chairman since its inception, has advocated for victims rights since his son was shot and killed on Christmas Eve 1982. Adams is frustrated by what he sees as the public's fascination with criminals. It galls him to compare what is spent on indigent legal fees with the money available to help people such as Crudup.

"The plight of the crime victims, and the hardships that are imposed on crime victims ... is not a priority," Adams says. "We go to great lengths -- and I support this, too -- to make sure that every citizen is treated fairly by our system of justice. We are more careful, and devote more time and resources, to guaranteeing the rights of the perpetrators than to mending the lives of the recipients of their dastardly deeds."

At its March meeting, the commission took up more than 120 applications for help, including one from a Raleigh woman who says she needs continued counseling after a domestic assault but can't afford the $100-an-hour care. Initially, commission staff recommended denial because of questions of whether the woman might have provoked the incident.

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