Before He Wakes (2 page)

“What happened?” he asked.

“An accidental shooting,” one of the first responders told him.

The ambulance arrived, and with it Tom Scott, a paramedic. The first responders yielded to his greater experience, and he began to administer to the man in the bed, whose blood pressure had started falling quickly, his pulse racing. At 6:18 his blood pressure was 170/110, four minutes later 140/102. During the same period, his pulse went from 120 beats per minute to 130. This was known as the Cushing reflex, and it was typical of patients with head injuries who were bleeding. Since Russ was not bleeding externally, Scott knew that his cranium was filling with blood, and if it could not be stopped and his condition stabilized, the increasing pressure on his brain would soon kill him.

As worried as they were about their patient, the rescue workers also had another concern: the cocked pistol still lying on the bed. If it had gone off so easily once, might it not do so again? Clark Green was unfamiliar with .25 semiautomatics, though, and was reluctant to handle it. Another deputy, Paul Hornbuckle, had arrived and he picked it up by inserting a ballpoint pen into the trigger guard. He was carrying it into the hallway to disarm it when Kevin Wilson rushed into the house. A tall, thin man with glasses and a thick mustache, Wilson saw the gun pointing in his direction as he entered the hallway and called out to let the officer know that he was there, causing Hornbuckle to swing the pistol barrel away from him.

Not only was Wilson a captain in the Lebanon Fire Department, he also was in charge of emergency medical training in the county and was by far the most experienced medical technician at the scene. Seeing Tom Scott working on the man in the bed, he asked, “What can I do?”

“He’s got a lot of blood in the oropharynx,” Scott said.

Wilson climbed onto the bed to assist him. The man’s face was now covered with blood, and Wilson had no idea who he was. As he donned a stethoscope to listen to the patient’s heart and lungs, he was distracted by a woman’s voice saying, “My God, I’m scared of these guns. I wish he wouldn’t keep them there.” He looked up and realized that he knew the woman. She was Barbara Stager. While the first responders had been working on Russ, she had slipped into the bathroom and changed clothes, emerging in blue jeans, a gray and blue sweatshirt and sneakers.

“You ever have the feeling that your heart has dropped to your stomach and what hasn’t dropped is up in your throat?” he later asked. If that was Barbara, he knew, this had to be Russ. “I thought, ‘My God, it can’t be!’ ”

Wilson had been in Sunday school classes with Russ. They had socialized at church and attended boat shows together. Russ’s sister, Cindy, was a close friend of his wife’s. Russ’s father, Al, served with him as a deacon at Grey Stone Baptist Church near downtown Durham. Wilson’s years of training forced him to block out emotion and concentrate on his patient, but Barbara was talking so loudly that he couldn’t hear what the other rescuers were saying.

“My God,” she kept repeating, “I’m scared of these guns. I wish he didn’t have these guns. I wish he wouldn’t keep them under the pillow. Guns are not safe. There are kids in the house.”

“Somebody get her out of here,” Wilson said, and Green and Hornbuckle led her from the room and into the kitchen, where they attempted to quiet her so that they could ask routine questions for their reports.

Wilson and Scott suctioned the blood from Russ’s mouth and throat and inserted a breathing tube. They slipped a needle into his arm and started an IV. They put a neck immobilizer on him and called for a backboard. Not only would the board protect Russ’s spine from being further damaged by any bullet, it also would provide a hard surface for administering chest compressions if his heart and breathing stopped.

Meanwhile, Green and Hornbuckle were questioning Barbara in the kitchen, where her thirteen-year-old son, Jason, had been waiting anxiously.

“I kept telling him about those damn guns,” she said, repeating herself several times. Russ, a National Guardsman, had “stages” in which he became enamored with guns, she said. She turned to her son. “Tell him, Jason, about him having these stages about guns,” she urged, and her son agreed.

“He carries guns in cars, leaves them under the pillow,” Barbara went on. “He is scared about somebody coming into the house, but it’s just the dogs barking.

At one point Green asked, “Have you had any marital problems?”

“No,” she quickly responded.

Kevin Wilson emerged from the bedroom, where others now were putting Russ on the backboard, and asked Barbara to which hospital she wanted Russ to be taken. Regulations required the rescue workers to take critically injured patients to the nearest facility, but since they were equidistant from Durham County General Hospital and the Duke University Medical Center, Wilson decided to leave the decision to Barbara.

“Duke,” she said without hesitation. She worked there as a staff assistant. Her mother, father and brother also worked at the medical center.

It was 6:43 when the ambulance pulled away from the house, the siren rending the morning calm of the peaceful suburb.

Wilson saw the ambulance off, then returned to the kitchen to see what he could do for Barbara. He knew that Russ’s father had had heart surgery some years earlier, and he thought perhaps he and their minister, Malbert Smith, should go to the house to tell him what had happened. If Al should have an attack of some sort, he would be there to administer aid.

“Can I help in any way?” he asked. “I would be happy to go to Al and Doris to get them. Or get Malbert.”

At the suggestion Barbara thrust out both hands, as if to push him away. “No,” she said sharply. “Don’t call anybody. Don’t call Malbert and don’t call Al. I don’t want you to do anything.”

Wilson was taken aback. For long moments he looked at her, uncertain of what to do. “Fine,” he finally said. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to help.”

Green said that he would take Barbara to the hospital, and Wilson turned and went outside, where Doug Griffin was putting his emergency first aid case back into his Volvo.

“Before you do anything else,” Wilson told Griffin, “I want you to sit down and document everything you saw and heard so we can attach it to the regular report.”

Wilson had known Barbara from the time she had married Russ, but he had heard nothing about her that had led him to believe that she was anything other than a devoted mother, a loving wife, an upstanding employee, a dedicated Christian. Like many others who knew her, he soon would be shocked as reports began to circulate about a far different side of her character. Then he would be glad that he had made certain that a careful accounting of the morning’s events had been set down.

2

Doris Stager did not hear the wailing siren of the ambulance that roared by on Cole Mill Road just a few hundred yards from her shaded brick house on Rivermont Drive. She awoke at seven as usual and went about getting ready for work, unaware that her only son lay gravely wounded with a bullet in his head.

By eight, Doris was at her secretarial job at Bull City Oil Company, ready for another day’s work, expecting nothing out of the ordinary. Not until forty-five minutes later did her phone ring and she hear the voice of Marva Terry, her son’s mother-in-law.

Marva rarely called her and never at work, and Doris was surprised. Barbara’s mother had always been aloof and disdainful to Doris, and the two women were not close. She could tell from Marva’s voice that something was wrong, and without preliminaries Marva told her what it was:

“Russ is in emergency at Duke.”

“What is the matter?” Doris asked anxiously, but Marva didn’t answer.

“What is the matter?” Doris demanded.

“Barbara wants you out here,” Marva told her, but would say no more. Doris should just come to the hospital, she insisted.

Clearly, something terrible had happened to her son. A heart attack? A car accident? Russ should have been at work by now. He was a driver’s education instructor at school. Had some nervous student driver made a horrible mistake at the wheel? A swirl of fears raced in her mind.

A tiny, intense woman, Doris normally took charge of any situation, but she found herself so upset that she couldn’t even remember how to get to Duke Medical Center, only a few miles away. Coworkers tried to calm her and gave her directions. She drove as fast as she dared, her mind tumultuous with uncertainty and a dreadful sense of foreboding.

Doris practically ran into the emergency room, frantic with worry. When she asked about her son, she was immediately shown into a small room off the emergency room waiting area, a room reserved, she knew, for families receiving the direst of news.

Barbara was standing in a comer, sobbing softly, her son, Jason, crying at her feet. Barbara’s parents were there as well, looking grave, as was her minister, Larry Harper. Against one wall leaned a man Doris had never seen, whom she soon would discover to be a hospital chaplain.

“I’m sorry,” Barbara cried out as soon as she saw Doris. “I didn’t mean to do it. Forgive me.” She kept saying it over and over, Doris later would remember, yet she offered no explanation of what had happened to Russ, the only thing that Doris wanted to know.

She was desperate for the truth that all in the room seemed reluctant to share with her, and finally Marva stepped forward to tell her. Doris heard the awful words but later she wouldn’t be able to remember a thing that Marva had said. Her mind simply couldn’t accept that her son had been shot in the head. Her concern was only for Russ. What was his condition? What was being done for him? When could she see him?

“Where are the doctors?” she asked. “What do the doctors say?”

The questions kept tumbling from her lips. “Why aren’t they here? When are they coming? When can we talk to them?”

Nobody had answers, and Doris couldn’t accept the uncertainty. She had to escape the confines of that room, these grave faces without answers. She could not remain still. She wheeled and burst out of the small room, uncertain where she was going or what she intended to do.

Walk. She had to walk. Nervousness always made her walk. The chaplain followed, hoping to comfort, stopping her just outside the door.

Only then did the enormity of the situation strike Doris with full force. “No, God!” she cried, putting her head in her hands.

Awed by her grief and helpless to relieve it, the chaplain stood close, saying nothing.

Al! Doris suddenly realized that her husband didn’t know yet. Retired because of his medical disability, he was at home. She had to tell him, had to get to a telephone. There was a phone in the family room, the chaplain told her, and she went back inside and dialed her own number. Later, she wouldn’t remember what she told Al or how he responded. She could only recall emphasizing to him to be careful driving to the hospital. She tried to sit after talking with Al but found it impossible.

Only walking could relieve her explosive anxiety.

“If you have to walk, why don’t you go to the outside corridor?” the chaplain suggested, and she did, walking back and forth as hard as she could, all alone, talking with God, crying, pleading for her son’s sake, not caring who might see or hear her, or what they might think.

Finally, Marva came out to the corridor, but before she could say anything, Doris looked up and saw her husband hurrying past the glass doors of the emergency room. Marva turned to leave.

“There’s no need for you to go,” Doris said to Marva. “Here comes Al.”

But Marva went back to the waiting room, leaving them to comfort each other. Doris rushed into her husband’s arms, and then they both started walking the corridor, back and forth, crying together, praying, telling themselves that Russ wouldn’t want to become a vegetable locked in a coma, hooked to machines; he loved life too much.

Three doctors arrived in white smocks and marched in rank into the family waiting room. When Doris saw them and tried to follow, one of them, not knowing who she was, raised a hand to stop her. As he closed the door on her, Doris heard Barbara saying, “Oh, no, you’re going to tell us that you’ve got to perform surgery.”

Doris was so distraught that she just stood with her forehead against the door, unable to move, cut off not only from her son but from those who held his fate in their hands.

The doctors quickly got to the point. The bullet had passed through Russ’s brain and lodged in the front of his skull. The situation was hopeless. He was brain-dead. Extreme measures could prolong the life in his body, but he would never again be a functioning human being. Did Barbara want them to use these measures?

She looked at them quizzically.

One of the doctors explained that “extreme measures” meant hooking Russ to life-support equipment. “That’s a decision you’ll have to make,” he said. “We can’t decide that.”

Barbara turned to Jason with a look of distress.

“Daddy wouldn’t want that,” Jason said, and Barbara agreed.

The doctors offered their condolences.

When they opened the waiting room door to leave, Doris was standing there with a look of helplessness on her face.

“Please,” she said. “I’m his mother.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” one of the doctors told her.

“Can’t you perform surgery?” she pleaded. “Can’t you do something?”