United States: survivors of shootings, life after the bullets

Columbine, Parkland, Baltimore... These city names rhyme with death, that of the countless people shot dead in the United States over the past twenty years.

In a country where firearm deaths approach 40,000 per year, suicides included, the victims are also the injured. Those who, once the media interest dissipates, continue to suffer physically and struggle with their psychic demons.

AFP gave the floor to three of them.

- The first mass shooting in a school -

When Kacey Ruegsegger hears a series of + pop pop + behind the window of the library of her Columbine high school, the young American turns around to see what is happening. The noise stops as quickly as it started and she plunges her nose back into her magazine.

It's April 20, 1999. Kacey's favorite band, NSYNC, is dominating the album sales charts, the internet is starting to boom in homes, and no one has heard of school shootings.

Seventeen-year-old Kacey Ruegsegger shouldn't have been in high school that afternoon, but the teenager decides to spend her lunch break at the library.

A few minutes later, a teacher enters screaming to signal the arrival of armed boys.

“The panic and her voice showed that it was real and that we had to bend down and hide,” recalls the young woman, interviewed by AFP in her house in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband and their four children.

She takes refuge under a desk, hugs a chair against her and waits. She thinks she has found a good hiding place and hopes the shooters will get past her.

She is wrong. "He killed the boy behind me, pointed his gun at me, and I remember hearing the gunshot hit me," Kacey said.

The bullet from the rifle lodges in the back of his right shoulder and then pops out.

On this day in the spring of 1999 in this Colorado high school, twelve students and a teacher were shot dead by two teenagers from the establishment, who then ended their day.

This drama is the first mass shooting in an American school, a phenomenon that has sadly repeated itself ever since.

For Kacey Ruegsegger, this April 20 marks the beginning of a long nightmare. The young woman is hospitalized for weeks - she will be operated on ten times. And the family is constantly solicited by the media.

A small light comes to lighten the darkness of the moment when she receives a visit from her beloved boy band, NSYNC.

His right arm, which risks amputation, is saved in extremis thanks to a bone donor. The results are not perfect: reduced mobility, shoulder asymmetry and scarring. But the transplant changed his life.

For a while Kacey Ruegsegger was able to continue to live her passion, horse shows, and even to participate in world championships.

She then led a short - but very successful - career as a nurse, before giving up after warnings from her doctor: she risked losing her arm.

Beyond its physical consequences, the trauma linked to this attack suffocates the young woman. She slept on the floor of her parents' bedroom for months after the shooting and continued, for several years, to suffer from intense episodes of post-traumatic stress.

"A car's exhaust pipe could create a panic attack in me," she explains.

"If I was at the supermarket and someone walked in and for whatever reason it triggered a panic attack in me, I had to leave and go home and my day was over."

Gradually, and with the help of her husband Patrick, Kacey managed to overcome her anxieties. She has written a book to help other traumatized people and tells her story at conferences.

Today, she says, "I can embrace my children with my two arms".

- "I am suffering" -

It's a banal story: an altercation at a party escalates and it comes to blows.

But in the United States, where firearms abound, particularly in the city of Baltimore, these disputes can quickly degenerate. And this daily violence does not make the headlines.

It's 2007 and Antonio Pinder, 19 years old at the time, leaves with his uncle to pick up his mother at a party.

On the spot, the young man starts a conversation with a young woman, which is hardly appreciated by one of the guests. An argument breaks out.

A moment later, a bullet pierced his torso on the left side and came out of his back on the right side.

"I ran across the aisle and was just trying to run away, with a hole in me," he recalled.

If you're going to over-alliterate, this is how you do it Alan Moore style (from "1963") https://t.co/1Q7Y03y5rw

— Dave, the Comic Book Herald Fri Dec 28 21:00:27 +0000 2018

Antonio Pinder collapses in the arms of one of his cousins ​​who came to his rescue and sees himself dying.

Convicted for this crime, his attacker has since been released.

Today, the 31-year-old is tall and well-built. But this handsome appearance masks the struggle that kept him from working for years and undermined his self-confidence.

As it passed through his body, the bullet destroyed half of his intestines.

After a first operation, he was initially able to resume his work. But complications, which caused inflammation and aggravated pain, prompted him to sue the doctor.

He also suffers from three bowel obstructions requiring treatment in hospital.

"All day, every day, I suffer, when I go to sleep, when it rains, I curl up in my bed, I spend my life in the hospital."

His state of health prevents him from eating certain dishes such as red meat, otherwise he exposes himself to hours of vomiting and pain.

Impossible to work full time, warns his doctor. Delicate equation when you have to raise a family of six children with his partner in a difficult neighborhood.

He calls himself "depressed". “I feel like I let them down a lot of times,” he says.

- Parkland's "Iron Man" -

The Borges family fled Venezuela in 2014. Anthony was then 12 years old.

Four years later, the teenager is at his high school in Parkland on Valentine's Day when a former student opens fire with a semi-automatic rifle and takes 17 lives.

Anthony, a slender young boy, was hit five times: in the back, under the armpit and in the left leg.

"You struggle to leave Venezuela and have a new life and then it happens," the 16-year-old laments today.

When he is hit by bullets from an AR-15, a semi-automatic assault rifle, Anthony enters a classroom where 20 other students are hiding. He bars the door with his body and takes four more bullets before the shooter continues on his way.

"Iron Man" is then nicknamed in reference to the invincible Marvel superhero.

"I don't really feel like a hero, I'm just a normal person", puts Anthony into perspective today.

As if immune to the sweltering Florida heat on this August day, he is dressed in a white sweatshirt and black joggers that he lifts to reveal deep scars.

After 13 operations and months of rehabilitation, Anthony regained his mobility, except for one foot. He still can't move some fingers and might need another operation.

"Sometimes I dream" of the horror that followed the shooting. "Sometimes my legs and back hurt when I walk."

He speaks little. When he speaks, he seems to be speaking to himself.

"All of this has made him calmer and more reserved," his father, Royer Borges, told AFP.

The experience of the drama gave him the energy to move forward in life, even though the shooter robbed him of his childhood dream of becoming a professional footballer.

Today, his eyes light up when we talk about his planned trip to Barcelona in March where he is to attend a match of Lionel Messi and his favorite football team.

And while his leg was on borrowed time, he now plays football with his friends. Soon he will resume training.

Anthony is homeschooled because his family no longer has faith in the school system. They took local officials to court for not protecting the students enough.

When all this is over, they want to live in Europe.

Many of Anthony's former high school buddies have become spokespersons for a movement to regulate guns. Not really the creed of the family. His father, a conservative Christian, thinks that the problem of weapons is first and foremost a mental health issue, the argument put forward in particular by Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, in August when a shooting killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, Anthony plunged back into painful memories.

"I felt something horrible because I know what it feels like."