‘I had made my peace with God in the ER’
How a mass shooting has changed this police officer’s life.
The extraordinary AURORA, ILL. — day that forever changed the lives of Aurora Police Officer Marco Gomez and wife Carly started out pretty darn ordinary.
Only, not really. Not if you take into account the little things, the weird things, that could be considered premonitions of a nightmare about to unfold Feb. 15 at the Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora.
For one thing, on the advice of a jeweler, when she and Marco went to work out together that Friday morning in February at the local CrossFit, Carly Gomez did not wear her wedding ring – a rarity in the eight years since the couple was married.
As a police officer’s wife, she always made it a point of saying “I love you … be safe,” after kissing Marco good-bye before he headed to work. But the early hours of Feb. 15 was just one of those extra rushed moments in a young family’s life: She had to get groceries before the kids got home after a half day of school and he’d decided to go in earlier to a meeting with Paramount Theatre management to review details of an upcoming active shooter training with employees.
Something else was just not right that day. The popular Community Oriented Policing officer, who would turn 40 in a few weeks, has experienced a couple of other days in his career “that didn’t feel quite right,” but nothing even close to the “honestto-gosh really bad feeling” that consumed him as he arrived at the police station on that frigid February.
And still, he made a choice to ride with Detective Jason Russell to that Paramount meeting, leaving behind his own squad car that contained his bulletproof vest, shield, rifle and extra ammunition for his holstered pistol.
Going against intuition was out of the ordinary for this Aurora police officer who had served two tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq and still carried shrapnel in his right leg from an enemy bomb his platoon was attempting to detonate just south of Baghdad.
Gomez had taken a few extra moments to warn an approaching shepherd of the danger, and as a result, didn’t quite get that right leg inside the Humvee when the timing fuse went off. But despite the injury, the sergeant was back with his men five days later, not because he felt pain-free but because he knew that being one man short put the entire platoon more at risk.
“As long as I was able to breathe and walk,” he said, “I had to go back and do the job.”
From the time he was a kid, Marco Gomez always “liked to be in the fight” — and not necessarily in a good way. Born in Mexico, he came to this country at age 7 with his mother and older sister after his 39-year-old father died of a heart attack and the family clothing store burned to the ground following the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.
“I got into a lot of trouble,” he recalled of his early years growing up in a tough South Side neighborhood of Chicago. But at age 12, Gomez also remembers watching the Gulf War on CNN as a pivotal point in his life. “I had this GI Joe attitude … and just wanted to be a super hero and help others,” he said. “I wanted to keep fighting but for the right reasons.”
And so, at age 17, Gomez signed up for the Marines, served four years of active duty, then became a North Lake Police officer and after 9/11 he “called the recruiting office” to join the Reserves because “I just love to protect and help people.”
And he continued to do just that when he joined the Aurora police in 2005.
Carly Gomez was under no illusions about the kind of man she’d married back in 2011. What had made her fall in love with a man who thinks nothing of “going right up to the danger” was also the reason “he drove me crazy.”
It was also the reason she almost lost him.
An active shooter call
Gomez and Russell were on their way to grab lunch after that late morning meeting about active shooter training at the Paramount when they turned on the radio to hear the call go out.
There was “an active shooter situation at 641 Archer.”
Both he and Russell — another “go-getter,” noted Gomez — were used to working the East Side and weren’t quite sure where the address was across the river. But after checking the map and realizing they were minutes away, Gomez said “we both instinctively knew we were going to be in the middle of things.”
By the time the pair got to the Henry Pratt plant, four squad cars were already parked out front, and there was an “eerie silence” that reminded Gomez of the calm before the storm in those Iraqi firefights.
“We knew they were all inside, going through the plant,” he said of the other officers at the scene. “And all I thought about at that moment was I had to get in there as fast as possible.
“If I told you I wasn’t scared,” he added, “then I’d be lying.”
Gomez’s first instinct, when he realized shots were coming at him and Russell as they approached the building’s main door, was to fire back. But his pistol hardly had the range that was needed and because “I was not wearing a vest” he took a couple steps toward the Pratt loading dock to give himself cover.
That’s when Gomez “felt the Charlie horse” in his upper right thigh and “knew I’d been hit.”
It was likely pure adrenaline at this point that kept the officer on his feet long enough to slide into the sloping dock area. But almost immediately, Gomez noticed his speech becoming slurred and he grew increasingly dizzy. He began taking off his pants to figure out where the wound was but could already smell the blood and feel its warmth.
Gomez, whose Marine unit had lost 16 men in two deployments, including three friends, knew he was in “big trouble.” Lying on his back he began using combat survival techniques: taking deep breaths, four at a time, to slow his heart rate. And he set goals. The first, to make it to the squad car and then stay alive long enough to get to the hospital.
Gomez credits Russell, who had joined him at the dock, as “key to saving my life,” not so much from the tourniquet he applied, but by notifying others of where the wounded officer had fallen, as the dock had him hidden from sight. The detective also helped keep Gomez mentally alert as he was transported to an awaiting squad car that whisked the bleeding patient, now going into hypothermia from loss of blood, to AMITA Health Mercy Medical Center.
The average adult, as it turns out, has between five to six pints of blood, and death can result if the body loses between three and five pints. It was only later Gomez learned he’d been given five units, with the ER staff “putting the blood in as fast as it was going out,” said his wife.
“I had made my peace with God in the ER, but I was not going to go out without a fight,” Gomez said of his struggle to remain conscious. He wanted to see his firstgrade daughter take riding lessons. He wanted to see her younger brothers play hockey and football. But he also knew if that was not possible, then “please,” he begged the ER staff and God, “let me live at least long enough to see my wife and kids one more time.”
It was a similar prayer being uttered many miles away.
A difficult day
As a police officer’s wife, Carly Gomez had already had that tough discussion with her husband about what to do should he not come home from work. And she certainly had played that reel over enough in her head to be familiar with how that scenario would go, should the day ever come.
Carly just didn’t think it would happen the one morning she forgot to tell her husband “I love you … be safe.” And in her mind, she always pictured that dreaded scenario with a squad car pulling up to her front door.
After a busy morning running errands, the baby was asleep in his upstairs crib, the two older kids were playing quietly in the family room and she’d just settled down for a little resttime on the couch when an APD number popped up on her cell phone.
“Mrs. Gomez,” a dispatcher on the other end calmly informed her, “there has been an active shooter situation. You need to get to Mercy Medical Center as fast as humanly possible.”
Even six months after that conversation, Carly gets emotional as she recounts the call that she at first thought “was my husband messing with me.”
But after the voice sternly assured her this was no joke and no drill, Carly went numb — fighting the urge to “puke or pass out” as she pictured the worst — her husband lying in a hospital riddled with so many bullets he’d look “like Swiss cheese.”
After “walking around in a circle like a zombie” for a while, Carly realized her neighbor, North Aurora Police Sgt. Mike Quinn, was home. She walked barefoot and coatless across the street and straight into his home before collapsing. “It’s Marco,” she cried. “He’s been shot. I have to go to Mercy and I don’t even know how to get there.”
Quinn immediately put his own three kids in the back of the Gomez minivan with Carly’s children and jumped into the driver’s seat. It was on that “agonizingly slow” trip to Mercy that she learned her husband had been shot in the hip. But that relief quickly dissipated, however, when she arrived at the hospital and saw the concerned faces of the ER staff, counselors and chaplains. And it turned to downright fear again when the doctor, his own face “white as a ghost,” took her into a private room and told her Marco’s femoral artery had been hit, “which is the worst possible place anyone can be shot because it is extremely hard to get to and hard to stop the bleeding.”
There is a chance her husband would not make it out of surgery, the doctor continued. But the good news was Marco was conscious, talking and even cracking jokes when they brought him in.
‘Divine intervention’
Marco remembers being wheeled into surgery with a male nurse literally sitting on him, pushing his knee into the wound to keep more blood from escaping. When he awoke from the anesthesia, he was surprised to see a deep incision running from the bottom of his chest through his abdomen, where the doctors had checked for damage.
Later, the couple said, three doctors informed them in separate conversations it was “divine intervention” Marco had survived so much blood loss from that bullet that hit but did not sever his femoral artery, that tore through his body from one leg to the other without inflicting more harm.
“I know that God put me in the world to do what I do. It is an honor for me to help people,” said Gomez. “I want to go out knowing I made a difference. I want it all to mean something, whether that’s saving someone’s life or helping my kids be the very best they can be.”
Gomez and his wife have been overwhelmed and deeply grateful for the response he’s received in the shooting’s aftermath, not just from the hundreds of supporters who filled Mercy’s waiting room those first three days, but from the thousands of people, many strangers, who offered their services or who sent gifts, cards and letters.
Marco is not sure how long it will take, but he hopes to “answer each and every one that has a return address attached.” And he wants everyone else who has offered prayers or expressed concern for him and the other four injured officers to know how much they appreciate the love that has been showered on them.
That being said, Marco Gomez, who believes he needs to maintain a “Superman mentality” in order to run into a hail of bullets at any given time, is uncomfortable with labels attached to his name, and continues to point to the officers inside the Pratt building as the true heroes because “they were in the fight far longer than I was.”
Gomez insists that what the APD went through on that day has without question “strengthened the brotherhood” within the department.
“While there has always been that blue line,” he added, “I can really feel it after this … we are all closer these days …. there is no question we would have each other’s backs.”
There are other ways this near-death experience has changed the injured officer. It has given him a chance to take stock of that tricky balance between work and family. It has intensified his appreciation for community. It has deepened an already solid faith in God. And it has allowed him to find forgiveness for the man who shot the bullet now permanently lodged in his body.
“I don’t want anger to fester and consume me,” he said. “Life is just too short.”
Which is why Gomez is more than ready to give up his “light duty” desk job and get back to his previous police duties. But in order to hit the streets running again, he’s got to rebuild the strength lost in his legs and core, which requires three days a week of intense physical therapy that often leaves him physically drained.
Next month, Gomez will also undergo surgery for a torn meniscus, which likely will set him back another six months.
His wife admits she’s not sure how she will react when her GI Joe husband, who now carries shrapnel in one leg and a bullet in the other, is back on active duty.
“Right now I’m just relieved he is here, that we are together and the kids have their father,” Carly said. “This shooting did not define us as a family. But it has made us stronger as a unit.”