Discharged: Gunshot victim home
When the two bullets cut clean through his left calf, Feroze Mohammed Ditta felt nothing.
He lay in the doorway, half-in, half-out of the Al Noor mosque. Pinned by 20 bodies, listening to the killer come back for a second go, he thought, ‘‘Today is the day I meet my maker’’.
But his maker had other plans. Sitting on his couch at home, his bandaged and cast-bound leg propped on a pouffe, a weary Ditta relished being back with his wife and two daughters, in familiar suburban surrounds, where the most threatening noise was the barking dog across the road.
The 51-year-old Mainfreight owner-operator was one of the first two seriously injured shooting victims discharged from hospital on Monday afternoon.
‘‘Two gunshot wounds to left lower leg . . . no bony injury seen,’’ was the sanitised description in the discharge notes. That’s not how Ditta remembered it.
He was at the Masjid Al Noor on Deans Ave for Friday prayers, as he was every Friday. Deep inside the main prayer hall, he heard the gunshots. Pap, pap, pap – like fireworks that wouldn’t let up. He ran to the emergency side exit, smashed the glass and tried to go through it.
‘‘It was like a stampede of people trying to get out. I was pushed over and there was a whole heap of people that fell on top of me. I just lay there, couldn’t move. I heard gunfire. He came in. He fired all his rounds, then it went quiet for a while . . . I lay on the floor . . . He came back again and had another go at shooting. I could hear it, it was so close. I thought, ‘today is the day I meet my maker’.’’
After about 10 minutes it went quiet. That was when he realised he’d been shot. Most of his body was shielded by the mountain of unmoving humanity on top of him, but his leg must have been exposed. As the shooter fired randomly, he was hit twice. At first, he felt nothing. But soon the pain became excruciating.
‘‘That’s when I dragged myself from underneath the pile. There were just bodies everywhere.’’
Unable to stand, he dragged himself out onto the road. There, a good samaritan in a ute was waiting. He threw out his tools and bundled Ditta into the back seat, along with two others, and drove them to the hospital.
Alongside the 50 lives lost at Al Noor and Linwood mosques, another 48 injured patients flooded Christchurch Hospital.
While he can manage the physical pain, the emotional damage is more difficult to repair.
‘‘At night I lay down, I still hear screams. I still hear the gunfire. The noises from people screaming. That’s still there.’’
Ditta moved here from Fiji more than 30 years ago, after the first coup. His two daughters – 21-yearold Sana and 25-year-old Zahra – have grown up here.