2ndShotBlog.com

Just three weeks ago the kid who lived next door was shot and killed. Not in the neighborhood. He was at a nightclub in the next town over. At 1 a.m. there was a fight in the parking lot. One of the guys in the fight went to his car, got a gun, and fired several shots at the man he was fighting. A stray bullet hit the 20 year old kid from next door. He was taken by helicopter to the same hospital trauma center that I was flown to.

He didn’t make it. He died at 4 a.m.

By all accounts, he wasn’t involved in the fight. Just an innocent bystander. I feel terrible. I’ve been composing this blog post in my head ever since. Something else happened this past weekend that made me decide to finally write it. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The kid was a mild irritant. He had an old Buick that he worked on incessantly. Painted metallic blue and silver, with lots of chrome, those hydraulics that would lift it up high off the wheels, and mufflers that made the engine LOUD. He thought he was cool driving that thing around. He looked ridiculous.

I feel terrible in part because I was just as ridiculous and probably far more irritating when I was his age. I had a black Camaro Z28 with a special after market stereo (remember 8 Track?), that I played LOUD. With my black aviator shades (that I wore even at night), I thought I was cool.

But I’ve lived my life. And I’m still alive. He’ll never meet a special girl, fall in love, have that girl gently wean him away from his childish endeavors, have a family and a career, and experience all the ups and downs that come with those.

The family next door immigrated here from Mexico. They’re hard working people. Even now, in the depth of this recession, they all have jobs. They’re up and out early in the morning. When they’re home they’re working on the house and the yard. I looked up their real estate record. They bought the house 12 years ago. They immigrated here and they worked hard and became legal residents. They had their little piece of the American dream. Now they also have a piece of the American nightmare.

This past weekend there was another shooting in downtown Sarasota. Three blocks from where I live. Right on Main St. at 9 p.m. on Saturday night, a half block away from a busy movie theater. There’s a small well-lit park where teenagers hang out. This 18 year old boy was parading around with a large Confederate flag. A black kid accused him of being a racist. An argument ensued. The black kid shot the kid with the flag. The wounded kid was flown to that same trauma center and he’s currently in critical but stable condition.

How ignorant to be parading around with a Confederate flag. Turns out the kid isn’t even a Southerner. He’s only been living here for a few years and is from Pennsylvania. But ignorance doesn’t deserve death. When you shoot somebody at close range, you’re trying to kill him.

When I read the above story in the newspaper, I decided to look up how much violent crime there is in Sarasota. Turns out, there’s a LOT. Take a look at this:

http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/fl/sarasota/crime/

I Googled ‘Sarasota Violent Crime’ and came up with a half dozen of these kinds of sites that rate the crime in different cities and towns. They all agree that Sarasota has one of the highest crime rates of anywhere in the US. More than almost anywhere in the first world.

I come back to “Why?” Can anybody tell me? What is it about Sarasota that causes it to have such a high rate of murders, rapes and violent assaults per capita? You can reply via commenting. Just click on the ‘Comment’ text that appears at the top of this post.

“It was a drug deal gone bad.”

I assumed I was in Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I was listening to two nurses talking about me.

When you lose more than 50% of the blood in your body, everything shuts down. To keep me alive, they had a ventilator forcing air into my lungs. My heart must have been beating. I don’t know whether it was assisted or not. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. At that point, the only thing I could do was listen.

I felt my bowels let loose underneath me.

“Oh, gross! He shit himself.”

I could understand their disgust. I’m a big boy, and they would have to clean me up. But I had been shot in the belly. Wouldn’t there be an expectation? Wouldn’t a bowel movement be a sign of something – either positive or negative?

I still don’t know how those hospital employees came to the conclusion that I was shot during a drug deal. That’s not what happened. The police report details what did occur.

When I answered the door that night, I was wearing pants and a shirt, socks and sneakers. I had no ID on me. It’s my habit to empty my pockets when I come home, and put the contents in the same spot on the kitchen counter.

I suppose it’s human nature to assume the worst. Especially when you work the night shift in an Emergency Room.

I found out later that I had been air lifted by helicopter to the Saint Petersburg Bayfront Trauma Center. I don’t know if Sarasota Memorial refused me because I didn’t have a health insurance card, or if the decision was made to move me because Bayfront had trauma surgeons at the ready.

After spending two hours with the Sarasota police at the station house, my girlfriend drove up to Bayfront with my insurance card. When she arrived around 1 a.m., she gave the card to the emergency room receptionist. I was in surgery. The people working on me had no reason to believe I had insurance to cover the cost of the surgery. All they saw was a naked man (the EMTs had cut away my clothes) covered in blood.

My femoral artery had been severed. That’s a 10 to 15 minute bleed out. The Sarasota police were on the scene immediately. An unseen eye witness watched the whole incident and dialed 911 as soon as I dropped to the ground.