Dying Diary #22

You may have seen it on the national news that night; I was told that it was on.

Dateline: Huston, TX
Carjacker killed by driver, One Other dead
That was the headline. I was the driver, the carjacker was a 26-year-old guy who shall remain unnamed, since he had about five alieses; and the One Other was our beloved Erin. Murleen was luckily unimjured.

It started off to be a good day. I had driven the girls to *** mall, one of Huston's finest. I had then gone to run some errands, and I picked them up at about 6:00PM, just as the 5:00 traffic was letting up. They were both excited about their purchases as Erin got in the front seat and Murleen got in the back seat. Erin had just gotten her seat belt fastened and I felt cold steel behind my left ear and a soft voice saying "Don't move."

At this point, both girls started screaming, and I guess I did too. I instinctively jerked my head back and accidentally put the cadillac in reverse.

The guy fired the gun just as I jerked my head, and a good portion of my nose was blown off, and the bullet hit Erin right between the eyes. Murleen had dived out of the back door and was scrambling away on all fours. During that split second, I retain a vision of the surprised look on Erin's face, the look of horror on the womans' face that was passing in front of the car and the blood-and-brain splattered passenger-side window before it crumpled.

I hit the accelerator (again, instinctively, I don't remember doing anything consciously) and the guy was knocked down by the open door and his left leg was under the front tire, but he still had the gun in his hand, and he fired again,shattering my left shoulder. There was no pain, just a heavy blow to my shoulder, knocking me into Erin. I straightened up immediately, and the gunman was taking aim at my head. I floored the accelerator and he disappeared just as the gun went off again, this time hitting me in my left hip; this time I fell over to the left, almost out the door. I could see the hand that held the gun, and the Caddy lurched and the hand relaxed as I heard a sound like a canaloupe hitting the pavement. There was a sharp jolt as the Caddy hit the car behind it.

I turned off the ignition and sat there a few seconds; I remember people gathering around me, and I remember thinking that I was going to die. I slumped over again, and I didn't wake up for about a week.

And then I spent the next two months in the hospital, getting put back together and rehabilitated. At this point, I can move everything the way that it's supposed to move, only it still hurts like hell. I had a temporary colostomy for about six weeks, but that's gone now. The last bullet shattered the bone in my pelvis and shredded some intestines and my left ureter, the tube that carries the urine from the kidneys to the bladder. And it also nicked my iliac artery, almost enough to make me bleed to death, but not quite.

Murleen suffered a broken elbow and a broken kneecap when she bailed out of the back seat, and I also ran over her hand with the rear tire and broke some fingers, but physically she healed very quickly; she is, after, a relatively young and active person. Psychologically, though, she is still a basket case. She had originally thought that both Erin and I were dead. After the gunman was dead, she opened the passenger door and saw Erin and me and the car was covered with blood and brains and bits of bone. She immediately passed out, of course. And she still has nightmares constantly. They have started becoming more infrequent lately, though, since I've come home and am sleeping in the same bed. The second bullet, the one that hit my shoulder, drove pieces of bone into my lung, collapsing it. The doctors said that I was lucky, if the bullet wouldn't have hit my shoulder bones it would've killed me for sure, hitting my heart. The lung thing isn't something I remember, though... the tube was out before I woke up. It healed pretty quick. The guy with the gun had been laying down inthe car next to me when I pulled up, trying to hot-wire it. When the girls started getting into the car, he decided to get a car the easy way. The cops said thathe was planning on killing me from the git-go and pulling my body out of the car and taking off. This had happened twice in the last month down here, probably the same guy.

He had an accomplice in the car next to the car that he was hot-wiring. That guy saw what was going on and took off. Some of the bystanders got the tag number and the cops found the car almost immediately, about a mile from the mall. There was a gunfight and one cop put a bullet in the guys head, he'll never talk again, or do anything other than breathe. Well, I've heard that he knows enough to wipe his nose but not his ass. And that pisses me off: I'm paying money (taxes) to keep this guys body alive when his brain is almost completely gone. He didn't have much of a rap sheet yet, though, just a couple of DUIs. He was just getting started on his criminal career.

Most victims of a crime like this make up lists of what could be done to reduce the crime rate. Not me. Shit happens, and this time it happened to me and Murleen and Erin. And it is interesting to note that there have been no carjackings in Huston since this happened.

And I miss Erin so much, and so does Murleen. Things can never be the same... I thought that I would never take anything for granted once I had my cancer diagnosed, but I realize that I had only gone half-way. I wish that I could go back... and I can't. I can only go forward.

And even after all of this... my cancer is still in remission. The doctors told me that if it was going to come back, it would attack while my defences were down... and it didn't.

My Dying Diary #22