A teen’s battle for life beyond bullet

A year of 3,000 shootings

CHICAGO, Oct 24, (AP): He suddenly felt as if a hot wire had torn through his chest. It hurt to breathe.

Jonathan Annicks wasn’t sure he’d been shot. It was after midnight when he’d dashed outside his family’s house to retrieve a phone charger from the car. Now, slumped over in anguish, he frantically punched his brother’s number into his phone.

“You might have to take me to the hospital,” he gasped, “Come outside, please!”

He slid from the car; his legs ended up splayed across the floorboard, the top half of his body sprawled on the pavement. The driver’s side window was shattered, the passenger door flung open. In the harsh glare of a streetlight, a baseballsized smear of blood glistened on the center console.

Jonathan had seen the gunman for just a few seconds: a hooded stranger wearing shiny earrings who bounded out of a van, stood about six feet away and uttered something like, “What’s up, homie? Run it.”

Jonathan opened the car door and tried to flee, but too late. The shooter fired seven times at the 18-year-old, then sped away in the van down the lonely Chicago street.

Incredibly, all the shots missed, except one. Like a high-speed missile, a 9 mm bullet plowed into his left shoulder, punctured both lungs, fractured his spine and lodged in the right side of his rib cage under his arm.

As Jonathan lay on his back, neighbors were screaming, and his father, straddling him, shouted, “Who did this to you?!!”

Jonathan reached up, tapping his father’s knee to calm him. “Stop! You’re giving me a headache,” he said. He urged his mother, who’d run out without shoes, to get dressed as an approaching siren grew louder.

Loaded into the ambulance, he closed his eyes to shut out the noise. But when he opened them, he noticed something strange: His legs were straight, but they felt as if they were bent.

He instantly knew something was terribly wrong and thought this was “not going to be a bullet that could be pulled out or a wound that could be stitched up.”

He felt super-sleepy. He closed his eyes again.

It was barely spring when Jonathan Annicks was shot, but there already were signs 2016 was going to be a very bad year in Chicago.

In the first three months, more than 140 people were murdered. The number of shootings approached 700 — nearly 90 percent higher than a year earlier. On the day Jonathan was hit, eight other people were shot. By fall, the number of homicide victims approached 600; total shootings exceeded 3,000.

The number of dead and wounded each weekend turned into a staple of Monday morning newscasts, a portrait of bloodshed on the city streets that seemed more like a tally of battlefield casualties.

Police say the overwhelming majority of shootings are tied to gangs. A flood of weapons also contributes to the chaos. On average, Chicago police seize one illegal gun every 61 minutes.

Victims

Lee

Most Chicago murder and shooting victims are young black men. More than 70 percent of this year’s dead were on a special police list of 1,400 people considered likely targets based on their gang histories or criminal records. Gang-related shootings, mostly concentrated in a few neighborhoods, often stem from conflicts over drugs and turf, petty disputes or escalating feuds on social media.

But others have been caught up in this mayhem, too: victims of robbery, mistaken identity, stray bullets or gang crossfire. A 6-year-old girl was shot while sitting on her porch, a 26-yearold mother driving in her car, a 71-year-old man watering his lawn.

The cases that attract the most attention tend to be particularly heinous — a 3-year-old boy paralyzed despite his father’s efforts to shield him. Or they’re inspirational — a star football player who returned to high school within days of being shot six times.

Jonathan Annicks’ story is both. His life has been transformed, but not defined, by a single bullet.

He was shot just about 100 feet from his family’s house in Little Village, a neighborhood 20 minutes from downtown. It’s the only place Jonathan has ever lived. His mom, Herlinda, was raised in that home. Her mother, 83-yearold Monica Martinez, a native of Mexico, lives there, too.

Little Village has a large Mexican population; its streets are dotted with that nation’s redwhite-and-green flags, taquerias and panaderias (bakeries). But a menace lurks in the neighborhood, too: gangs.

Gang members never messed with the three Annicks boys — Jonathan, Joshua, 17, and the youngest, 14-year-old Jacob. But their house is on a boulevard that’s a dividing line for opposing Latino gangs, police say, and Jonathan may have been mistaken for a rival gang member.

Whatever the motive, the flash of a stranger’s gun had devastating consequences.

Before, Jonathan had been a restless senior counting down the days at Walter Payton College Prep, one of Chicago’s most prestigious high schools, running an occasional 10K race with his mom, hopping on the el train to explore the city with his girlfriend, Cynthia.

On April 10, he was left with a bullet in his body and the first inkling of how much was about to change.

Jonathan was scared and shaking slightly when Wil Johnson entered the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital.

A veteran Chicago police detective, Johnson was not there for work but to offer comfort. He was Jonathan’s godfather.

“Hold my hand,” Jonathan implored.

Squeezing tight, Johnson reassured him: “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Johnson had investigated hundreds of shootings over the years, many of the victims gang members. This was different. This was Jonathan, the kid who’d never been in trouble, the kid who whipped him in floor hockey and joined Johnson’s family at beach outings every Labor Day.

Jonathan had been hit just once, so Johnson figured he’d get some routine treatment, then be released. But when the detective asked the doctor what was next, he was stunned by her reply.

Paralyzed

“He’s paralyzed,” she said. Johnson broke down in tears. The doctor relayed the news to Jonathan’s parents: The bullet, which had missed their son’s heart by an inch, had severely bruised his spinal cord. He had no movement below mid-chest.

Mike and Herlinda Annicks sobbed. “Paralyzed” sounded so final.

“You can’t wrap your mind around ‘never,’” his mother says. “He’s 18. That’s a long time.”

But when she was allowed to see Jonathan, there were no tears, no panic, just a mother’s comfort. “Whatever the outcome is, you’re still here,” she said. “You are who you are. We’ll be fine. We’ll deal with it.”

There also was no talk of paralysis. But later, Jonathan broached the subject with Joshua, noting he hadn’t been able to move his legs. Joshua said they’d have to wait for the doctor.

“If I’m paralyzed, just tell them to kill me now,” Jonathan told his brother.

The shock and anger faded quickly. So did the “why me?” feeling. It was pointless to dwell on it. “I started realizing this wasn’t the end of my life,” he says. “It wasn’t worth it to stay sad because I would just be making my life harder.”

Soon after, Dr Ray Lee, his spinal cord doctor at Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital, used a dry erase board in Jonathan’s room to diagram the spinal column and show him where the bullet had struck. His chances of walking again were minimal. Jonathan understood. But from his hospital bed he did some online research, scouting out places in Colorado, Switzerland, anywhere where work was being done that might get him on his feet one day.