Gunshot victim leaves hospital
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 with his bandaged and cast-bound leg propped up, 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 owneroperator was one of the first two seriously injured shooting victims to be 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 didn’t see much. But 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, waiting for him to come through. 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.’’
Then after about 10 minutes it went all 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