The Hole in the Window

Four years ago, I was living in a converted factory building in a run-down part the inner city. Late one afternoon I was in the basement changing the brake pads on my motorbike and heard a gunshot right outside. A woman started screaming and a man in his twenties came staggering towards the entrance with his shirt covered in blood. As we ran towards him, he leaned against the entrance wall and as I reached him, he fainted and I was left trying to hold up his limp body, which slowly slid down the wall. I didn't know at that stage whether he was dying or not and a large crowd quickly formed, all excitedly phoning emergency services. It transpired that he'd been on the way home from the supermarket and robbed of his cellphone at gunpoint and the thug had simply shot him in the stomach for good measure and run into the building opposite, which was a hell-hole full of poor people and criminals all living on top of one another in the most squalid conditions.

The shot man regained consciousness after a while and showed us his wounds; a bullet had entered below his ribs on the left side and exited close to his hip on his right side but the holes weren't bleeding very much any more although he was in terrible pain. Someone produced a cellphone and we dialed his sister's number so that he could speak to her. After that, he kept drifting in and out of consciousness, with his body becoming cold and clammy as shock set in. Whenever he regained awareness of his surroundings, he asked when the ambulance was coming and we kept trying to reassure him that it would be soon, even though it must have taken 1 1/2 hours before medical help eventually arrived.

Due the barrage of bystander phone-calls, emergency services first dispatched the police to see what was going on and two officers from the K9 unit (dog squad) eventually arrived, probably expecting to deal with a mob scene. It's likely that the paramedics were only summoned then by the cops, who seemed quite nonchalant about the whole scene. Finally the fire-brigade paramedics turned up, fire engine included. That was the first time I've seen firefighter paramedics dispatched to a shooting; perhaps the ambulance service was stretched thin at the time.

image source: Pixabay

I finally left the man's side so that the medics could get on with their job and went back inside and found a policeman looking around in the basement. I asked him what he was looking for and he pointed to the windows which line the wall at street level: the bullet had travelled though the man's body and through the basement window above where I was working, and ricocheted off somewhere. The cops never found the bullet and it dawned on me just how close I had come to being shot as well. The windowpanes were frosted glass and until I heard the gunshot, I had no inkling what was happening on the other side of the wall.

Eventually the paramedics finished stabilising the man and an ambulance arrived to transport him to hospital. When I phoned the hospital, the nurses refused to divulge anything about his state, except that he was there, on the grounds that only next of kin may be told. I heard later that he had survived - apparently gunshots that go straight through the lower abdomen are unlikely to be fatal because the bullet misses the major organs and don't bounce around inside, causing further trauma.

It was after that that I realised that it was time to move out of that building, the building opposite where I lived had just become too dangerous. I did so 5 months later, but not before an attempted mugging one night. But that is a story for another time.