The Last Shot

The bullet that Ray had been expecting most of his life caught up to him in the crowded parking lot of a Mattapan takeout restaurant while he was waiting for a bucket of chicken wings. The slug was probably a .38, weighed no more than a half dollar, and was traveling about 700 miles per hour when it ripped into his ribs, causing massive internal bleeding, then sliced through his back, severed his spine, and came to rest a few inches from his heart. Ray never saw the shooter or the gun, and he didn't feel much pain. He just felt his legs disappear from underneath him, as if someone had pulled the plug on a video game. Everything that was lit up and alert suddenly went dark. That dark space was replaced by a pressure that he describes years later as "empty." Then a fierce heat spread across his body, tracing the path the bullet had cut through his torso.

"There was nothing, no pain, no nothing; it was just hot," he says. "I couldn't believe the heat."

Ray (who does not want his last name used, to protect himself) is broad-shouldered and 24, with an easy smile. When he talks about the heat of that bullet, his hands cross his body, following its path. It's late afternoon on a cold winter day, and we're talking in his grandmother's cramped kitchen in Brockton, where he came to live after he was discharged from the hospital. The house, all six rooms of it, is well kept but reeks of his grandmother's cigarettes. Ray explains the mechanics of his wounds with a nearly flat affect.

"I'd been shot before," he tells me while sitting in the secondhand wheelchair he has used since he was paralyzed. He lifts up his blue T-shirt to show the dark scars on his chest and stomach. "But this time, you know, this time was different."

BETWEEN 1991 AND 2002, 800 PEOPLE WERE MURDERED in the city of Boston, the majority of them by gunshots. An additional 1,968 people were shot and survived. For the dead, there were funerals, streetside memorials, the flash of television footage, and maybe even newspaper stories detailing what went wrong. For the survivors, there was none of that. Just punctured organs, broken bones, and in some cases, wheelchairs to contemplate for the rest of their lives.

More than a decade after crack cocaine fueled the worst street violence in Boston's history, one little-noticed fallout from that period are the young and not-so-young paralyzed men scattered around the city's public housing developments, in senior-citizen apartment complexes and handicap-inaccessible buildings, and in some of the area's less-affluent suburbs. Now, with the city's murder rate reaching its highest level for midsummer since 1996, it seems almost inevitable that the young men who were struck down in Boston's last crime wave will be joined by a new generation of gunshot survivors. For some, it can mark the end of their independence, their spines damaged by a bullet, sometimes aimed at them, sometimes at someone nearby.

These men -- and nearly all of them are men -- constitute a ragged record of the city's violent edge. Many of them once ruled their streets, in some cases their gangs, through violence and intimidation, believing that a bullet would inevitably find them one day. They just expected that when it did, it would kill them. They never expected to survive being shot or, for that matter, imagined what their life would be like if they did. Some of them are victims, innocent bystanders in random shootings. Others were self-described predators whose injuries were met on the streets with a "they got what was coming to them" shrug.

Health care for the most severely injured costs up to $2 million over the course of their abbreviated lifetimes, and for the poorest, taxpayers will pick up most of the bill. The once-powerful young men remain isolated in their own despair, ashamed of their disability and by what they can no longer do. Ray wheels himself to the kitchen counter and opens up two cans of tuna fish. "Dinner," he says, smiling, and rolls back to the refrigerator to grab a jar of mayonnaise.

I ask him about the first time he was driven back to Orchard Park, the Boston housing development where he grew up, after he'd been paralyzed. He pauses and focuses on the mayonnaise jar. He drove over to the projects with a friend about a year later, he says, but he wouldn't get out of the passenger seat. He didn't want anybody to see his legs.

"I was just embarrassed by it. I mean, these were my boys, they know what's up, but . . . "

Coming to grips with paralysis is obviously difficult for anybody, but for young men who have defined themselves through their physical prowess, it can be overwhelming. According to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, about 70 percent of paralysis victims are unemployed eight years after their injuries. Among those newly injured paraplegics with no function or feeling in the lower half of their bodies, suicide is the leading cause of death. An untold number become addicted to alcohol or drugs as an antidote to their pain.

"It's pretty much constant," Ray says of the back pain that seizes him nearly every day. "And the pills they give me don't do [expletive]."

Some of the wounded were gang members. Others -- like 3-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott, who was sitting with her sister on a third-story porch in Dorchester in July 2003 when an errant bullet sliced through her spine -- were simply unlucky. Innocents from poor neighborhoods who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As disparate as their stories, those who survive describe the private hell they must cross before they can rejoin society in some, usually diminished, capacity.

"I'll be honest with you, I didn't want to live no more," says Ray, who grew up idolizing -- and then caring for -- an athletic older cousin who was also shot and paralyzed. "I knew what was in store, and I just didn't want it. Sometimes, when I'm alone and I can't sleep, I still think, 'Forget it, I want to die.'"

GUNSHOT PARALYSIS CARRIES A PARTICULAR BURDEN for young minority men in the city. Unlike a suburbanite whose injury is more likely to be the result of a car crash or a tumble off a ladder, young black and brown men who are shot are typically undereducated and unemployed when they are injured. With few resources to deal with their wounds, the majority become dependent on a state welfare system that isolates them and corrals them into a depressed subsistence, says Kenneth Mumford of Hyde Park, the 40-year-old program director for the Wheelchair Sports and Recreation Association, based in Massachusetts. Mumford has worked with paralyzed young men and teens for more than a decade. "These kids don't have much to start with," he says. "Then what they have is taken away from them, and they are abandoned. There is a stigma attached to being shot and paralyzed. If you're from the city, that's what people assume; if you're from the suburbs, they figure you were injured in car accident or something, and you're treated different."

TO UNDERSTAND THE STRUGGLES OF SOMEONE who doesn't know how to use the system, all you have to do is look at 20-year-old Lamar Leaston, a high school dropout from Dorchester who is a typical Boston gunshot victim. Of the hundreds of people who survived bullets on the city's streets between 1991 and 2002, almost nine out of 10 were black or Latino men between the ages of 15 and 34. Nationally, the percentage of paralysis caused by gunshots nearly doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, as street violence escalated and weapons became more powerful. Violence -- defined primarily as gunshot wounds -- accounted for one-quarter of all new paralysis cases in the 1990s but has since dropped to 10 percent as the country's crime rate has dropped overall.

Leaston got into a scrape with some kids in a Department of Youth Services lockup last year because he had two Dorchester street names associated with gangs -- Fayston and Brunswick -- scrawled on the tops of his sneakers. The feud festered until the night of October 13, when he was ambushed at a corner store. The first bullet hit Leaston's back just below his left shoulder blade. Everything from his chest down immediately went numb. The second and third bullets sliced into his leg, shattering his femur. "By then," he says, "everything down there was dead." The final bullet shattered the bone in his left forearm. Only then did he scream.

Leaston was rushed into surgery at Boston Medical Center. He was at least the third person to be paralyzed by a gunshot wound in the city within a four-month span. Two days later, when he regained con- sciousness, he asked his mother why he couldn't feel his legs. Today, neither of them can accept that he won't one day stand. "The doctors don't know," Leaston tells me months later in the small television room of his mom's fourth-floor Roxbury apartment.

The average hospital stay in an advanced rehabilitative program for someone who has just been paralyzed is about two months, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center. But Leaston was rolled out of Boston Medical Center in a rented wheelchair after just 20 days, with little idea of how to care for himself. At the entrance to his mother's red-brick apartment building, his younger brother lifted Leaston's slender body out of the chair and carried him to the apartment on his back. For months afterward, every time Leaston had to leave the apartment for a doctor's appointment, either his brother or a friend carried him.

In January, with a doctor's appointment an hour away and a handicap-accessible van scheduled to pick him up in 10 minutes, Leaston waits as his friend Rene Lane pulls up in a small Jeep with bald tires and runs upstairs. At the top of the stairwell, Leaston rolls his chair to the edge of the steps, and Lane, a muscular 17-year-old, squats with his back as close to Leaston's chair as he can. Leaston, smeared in baby powder to absorb his perspiration, grabs his friend around the chest, and Lane stands up. Lane adjusts his hands under Leaston's legs for a moment and then silently walks down the 54 steps. Barbara Leaston follows with her son's wheelchair. Outside, Lane gently unloads Leaston into the chair. Leaston smiles. "That's cool," he says. Lane drives off, and Leaston proceeds to argue with his mother about whether he needs to wear his winter coat.

The trip is the first time Leaston has left the apartment in a week. Most days in the months after the shooting, he sat alone, looking out of the window onto Dudley Street -- the scene of a dozen shootings last year -- or watching game shows on a small television with failing reception. Leaston's mother worries. A clerk at Target, she says she can't afford the $300 a month her son's diapers and bandages cost after the supplies the state gives her are gone. When they ran out a few weeks before this trip to the doctor, Barbara Leaston dabbed the bedsores on her son's hips with antiseptic ointment and covered them with makeshift bandages as best she could.

"It's all I can manage right now," she says, her voice soft and low. "What else can I do? I just need him to walk again. I don't like seeing him like this."

Mumford says Barbara Leaston is more the rule than the exception. "These kids are from single-parent families; we don't know the resources available, we don't have people that advocate for us when rehab is over. If you're minority, you're dumped right back into the community and forgotten about," he says. "That's the way it works here."

SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE in a relative's dimly lit first-floor apartment in Dorchester, Anthony Walton's mother wears a distant stare, her eyes filling with tears as she and her husband talk about how their son will celebrate his 16th birthday in a hospital bed, unable to move or feel anything from the neck down.

Walton was standing in front of his aunt's apartment in Charlame Park Homes off Humboldt Avenue in Roxbury at the end of last August, waiting for his parents to drive back to their home in Worcester. Two teenagers on bicycles pedaled up to him and asked him if he was from Geneva Avenue, a few blocks away.

"Worcester," Walton said, according to his mother, Katrina Walton. The teens both pulled out handguns and opened fire. One of the bullets hit Walton in the neck, severing his spine and leaving him a quadriplegic. Without insurance or jobs, his parents are dependent on the state for his care. In the months after he was shot, that included everything from a respirator that pumps air into his lungs through a tracheotomy, to a nurse by his side to change the television station for him. His father, Ronald Long, says he has no idea what his son will do when he grows up or how he and his wife will support him.

"Right now, I can't talk about his future or anything like that," Long says. "I just want him to walk again."

Denying the permanence of a spinal-cord injury is typical, says Mumford, but also damaging. Twenty years into his life as a paraplegic, the result of police gunfire during his arrest, Mumford evangelizes pragmatism.

"I don't want anybody to feel bad for me," Mumford says. "What I want is to have the same opportunity and chance as anybody else, regardless of how I became paralyzed."

What's important is not waiting for a technology to discover a miracle cure for spinal-cord injuries, he insists, but investing back into your life.

"It can get better; it does get better," Mumford says. "But it just doesn't come to you."

Waiting for a miracle is always painful but can be softened if victims are able to afford a decent quality of life. It's not something that someone whose sole means of support is a $500-a-month disability check can generally buy. While Mumford's preaching makes sense, it's out of step with the current zeitgeist in the spinal-cord injured community -- the school of thinking that says someway, somehow, the lame will walk again.

Despite the increasing numbers of poor gunshot victims with spinal-cord injuries, the groups that lobby for political support and funding for those with such injuries are dominated by people who have won settlements, explains Ron Bielicki, a Waltham resident and board member of the Boston chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. The spinal-cord-injured community is divided into two groups, says Bielicki, who was paralyzed in 1983 when he was shot by a mugger: those who get large settlements and those who don't. Because those with settlements have the time, money, and ability to attend conferences and sit on boards, their voices are heard. But gunshot victims, most of whom are minority and poor, usually have no one to sue and few places to turn.

Actor Christopher Reeve, injured in an equestrian accident, has made a crusade out of his desire to walk again. But, of course, Reeve has a staff to do things for him. Ray, who was paralyzed in May 2001, says he'd be happy with a wheelchair that has two good tires.

RAY BEGAN TO EXPECT his own premature death early in his childhood when both his father and his mother died, and he went to live with his aunt in the Orchard Park development. The concept of paralysis was introduced to him when he was 10 or 11 and an older cousin was caught in the middle of gang crossfire while playing basketball. He was paralyzed from the waist down.

Ray became his cousin's self-appointed protector and guardian. By the time he was 13, Ray had earned a reputation as a fierce street fighter, and by 17, he was dealing drugs. Before he dropped out of high school in the 11th grade, he had been stabbed once, shot three times, and had logged more than two years in youth detention centers.

"I never really expected to see my 18th birthday, because everyone I knew was dead or in jail," Ray says now.

The two guiding forces in his life are written on his body: His 5-year-old son's name, Keyon, and birthday are tattooed in gothic script on his left arm. Tattooed on his right triceps is a cross with a snake winding around it. In the open spaces are the initials of his parents and all his boyhood friends who have been killed. There are nine sets of initials.

"When you grow up the way I did," Ray says, "you just figure a bullet is going to find you one day."

When he woke up from his coma three days after he was shot, he had four tubes in his torso. Ray opened his eyes and saw his aunt. Her first words to him were that he was going to be like his cousin.

"I wanted to die," he says. "I wanted to crawl back inside the coma where I'd been and never come out. I couldn't face it."

By the time Ray was discharged from the hospital for the second time after recovering from a bedsore the size of a beer can near his hip, he had shriveled from 6 feet 2 inches and 225 pounds to 4 feet 5 inches -- in his wheelchair -- and about 110 pounds. Now, with most of the strength returned to his upper body, his girlfriend of more than a year, Paloma Barbosa, 25, stands half a head taller than he.

"I think she can deal with it OK," Ray says. "We met after I'd been shot, and she says she doesn't think of me as in a wheelchair."

Still, the consequences are real. During a recent shopping trip to the Wrentham outlets for size 12 boys' sneakers for Ray's son, Barbosa has to maneuver for two. When Ray gets into her green Saturn, she holds his chair in place, then disassembles it and stores it in the trunk and the back seat. When they get to the store, Barbosa is a blur of motion, pushing Ray, fetching what he can't reach, shepherding her 4-year-old daughter around the store.

In bed, sex "is not the same," Ray says. With medication, some paralyzed people can still have sex, but "she has to do everything," Ray says. "We're young, but we can't use our bodies the way you should be able to do."

His pleasure in life at the moment is PlayStation baseball. His frustrations are legion. Recently, Ray's grandmother, who was waiting to have her hip replaced, fell in her bedroom and was unable to get up. She called out to Ray, who wheeled his chair through the hallway to the threshold of her door. But because his chair is too wide to get into her bedroom, he could not reach her. He phoned for help, but if the telephone had been in his grandmother's room, there's no telling when help would have arrived.

"This house," Ray says, his hands waving across the cramped kitchen, "I can't stay here forever."

Indeed, handicap-accessible housing for people who have been paralyzed by gunshot wounds is a huge need, especially for those who have criminal arrest records that might disqualify them from public housing. Even if they don't have a record, the wait for wheelchair-accessible housing can often be two to four years, says Tony Williams, who advocates for people with disabilities through a Dorchester organization. And then, chances are the apartment will be in a senior-citizen facility away from friends and family.

Williams, who was paralyzed during a high school football game in 1982, lived in a facility for seniors and the disabled for 10 years, through most of his 20s. "It was very depressing. The seniors don't like you there, because you play your music too loud. There's a lot of tension."

Ray says he has no immediate plans to move out of his grandmother's place in Brockton. She, meanwhile, is waiting for him to go back to school and get his GED. Or get a job.

"He sleeps all day, wakes up at 3 or 4, goes to sleep at 6 [a.m.]. He needs to go back to school," Ruth King tells me. "He's got to get something going on, or he'll turn into a mush."

BEFORE THEY ARE SHOT, before their legs stop working and their arms stop responding to the commands their brain sends them, some of the young men think they can never get hurt.

"You're young, you're stupid; you think you're immortal," says Mumford. Reality sets in when the bleeding starts.

"Getting shot felt like all the air went out from my body," says Amilton DoSouto, 22, who was shot several times outside his Dorchester home last year, moments after he went out for a walk. As he was turning a corner, DoSouto heard a series of gunshots and felt a bullet rip into his back. He knew immediately that he'd been paralyzed.

Instead of falling, he stood, balanced on his suddenly dead legs, his face skyward, unable to duck, unable to run. More bullets slammed into his arms and torso. He says he never shed a tear.

A lot of victims, as tough as they are, profess no fear of violent injury. But Richard Serino, who heads Boston Emergency Medical Services, knows better. He has arrived at the scene of hundreds of shootings. One of the first thing medics do is rip off the victims' clothes to find out where all the bullets are. "They may have been shot in places and not know it," he says.

Inside the ambulance, gang members who cultivate a tough-as-nails air on the street frequently cry and ask for their mother, Serino says. "Sometimes they lose control of their bowels or bladder, and a lot of them are just surprised at how much it hurts. They don't recognize the consequences of violence. They see all these movies where the hero gets up after being shot five or six times, grimaces, and fights through the pain. It's not like that, and that surprises them."

As many wounded as there are in the city, Massachusetts is the safest state in the country when it comes to gunshot deaths, with fewer than three people per 100,000 killed by guns. The nation averages more than 10 per 100,000. In Washington, D.C., the rate is nearly three times that.

In some of the country's most violent neighborhoods, gunshot paralysis is so common that some shooters might actually prefer maiming to killing, says Dr. Kevin O'Connor, the medical director of the Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Program at Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. In the mid-1990s, when he was working in Newark, O'Connor remembers treating a man who told him the same story that a dozen patients had told his colleagues before. Gang members would walk up to the intended victim, put a gun to his neck, and ask: " 'Do you know what it's like to be a quad?' then pull the trigger. Then say, 'Now you do.'"

MacArthur Williams lives in Jamaica Plain's Heath Street housing development with his wife and four children. At 34, he has made peace with the injury that forever changed his life. But if he's forgiven, he's not forgotten. And O'Connor's story brings a sudden stillness to Williams's usually animated face.

Williams used to hang out with Boston's notorious Intervale gang when he was a teenager. One night in 1989, when he was changing a tire on his Hyundai, two teens from the Castlegate gang rolled up. One had been beaten up earlier that weekend, and they asked Williams about his gang affiliation. They didn't believe him when he said he had none, and one of them turned to the other and told him, "Do your job." The second teen pulled out a gun and shot Williams twice. He hasn't walked since.

"I'll hear those words till the day I die," Williams says." 'Do your job.'"