You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Getting shot 11 times and living.
I stub my toe and think the world is coming to an end.
This victim? Well he defies all logic.
I am sitting in a small room just off the solarium on the 6th floor of the hospital.
The roof is a giant window so the ambience of the sun can filter in providing light and life sustaining ambience.
The victim’s oldest sister is before me.
She is polite and reserved.
She is the oldest of 5 younger brothers.
She is holding a piece of papers with bullet points that she wants to make to me.
She wants to remind Nashville to find the shooter who gunned down her brother in a downtown parking garage.
She says her brother used 100 units of blood during this atrocity and she wants everyone to donate to the Red Cross.
She wants to thank the Loews Hotel and the Hampton Inn for allowing her parents to stay close to their son over the difficult 3 weeks.
But mostly she wants to tell me about her little brother.
He is young and handsome. He has Don Johnson scruff and his facebook page is loaded with starlets and girls on his arms.
He was in town June 13th for the CMA’s.
Early Saturday morning he and a buddy enter a parking garage.
They discover someone went through their jeep and stole some belongings.
They hear a car alarm so they run to the noise.
When they arrive, they confront the car burglar who is holding their stuff.
What happens next is volatile, unexpected, life altering.
The car burglar pulls out a 40 caliber semi auto and begins blasting.
He shoots and shoots and shoots emptying the clip.
15 shots with 11 hitting the Kentucky man.
The bad guy gets away and the victim is rushed to the hospital.
He is hit in the heel, the calf, the thigh, the elbow, the forearm, the back, the torso.
His intestines are dissected and his lung ripped apart.
Yet the man is alive.
“He’s a miracle,” the sister will tell me.
It proves that it’s only your time to die when it’s your time to die. Somewhere, there’s a master calendar and there’s an X through the date with your name. You could be stung by a bee and die on that day. But get shot 11 times on a day with no X in your box.
Well you got a chance.
The sister will tell me how he loves baseball and playing with his many nieces and nephews. He is good to his mom and dad. “He’s charming, “she will say.
“I love him to death,” his youngest brother says. “It’s remarkable that he is still here. I have a lot of respect for him. He’d take the shirt off his back for anyone. He’s a man’s man.”
I listen to the story and the courageous fight to survive.
11 bullets hitting skin and tissue and organs and shattering bone.
I am amazed he has survived and is expected to make a full recovery.
The family shows me the CMA badge their brother was wearing when he was shot.
There is a 40 caliber hole punched in the logo.
The reality is pure and raw.
This much violence on one of Nashville’s biggest weekends in the heart of downtown?
The city should be ashamed that this could happen.
But violence in America can happen anytime, anyplace.
Even in a downtown parking garage with a billion police officers patrolling the streets everywhere.
So tonight the family will implore that someone find the 21 year old shooter with the stones to pull the trigger 15 times.
If the Kentucky construction worker wasn’t such a bad ass, with a will to live, with an unchecked box in the cosmic alignment, the gunman would be wanted for Murder and not attempted murder.
The family is also angry, because 4 months earlier, police arrested the man on felony pot and weapons charges. But once he got to court, the bad guy was allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor pot possession and the weapons charges were dropped. So he got probation and no jail time.
Fast forward 4 months, and the guy, barely old enough to drink, is in a downtown parking garage pumping a Kentucky construction worker full of lead.
Wow.
I will go back to the station and listen to the banter of co-workers upset about the rain or the lack of selections in the vending machine.
Then I think about the guy with the mutilated intestines and the shattered femur and the will to live.
I doubt he cares if it is raining or if the potato chips are stale.
Perspective.
It’s all how you look at it.
He wants to live. He is willing himself to live.
His box is not yet checked!
Now let’s catch a bad guy with no moral conscious before he blows someone else away.
Life’s Crazy™