One Bullet Can Kill, but Sometimes 20 Don’t, Survivors Show

Authored by nytimes.com and submitted by iteration359

While Mr. Guzman survived at least 13 shots, Mr. Bell was struck only four times, and two of those shots were fatal. A bullet was found lodged near Mr. Guzman’s left kidney, and he had wounds on the left side of his chest and on his right cheek, among other places, according to testimony at the detectives’ trial on Wednesday from Dr. Albert Cooper, the surgeon at Mary Immaculate Hospital who treated Mr. Guzman on the morning of the shooting.

Matter from Mr. Guzman’s intestines spilled into his abdominal cavity, creating the potential for deadly infection, Dr. Cooper said.

Mr. Guzman survived an onslaught that would kill a person 99 percent of the time, Dr. DiMaio said. Mr. Guzman’s saving grace may have been the Nissan Altima he sat in as the detectives fired, Dr. DiMaio said.

“If they go through metal, the bullets may have so little energy they get into the muscle or fat and then they stop,” he said.

A person’s physical size does not matter much when it comes to the damage a bullet can do, the doctors say.

In 1995, the man in North Carolina, Kenny Vaughan, did not have a car to protect him when he was shot about 20 times in Rougemont.

As Mr. Vaughan pulled into his driveway one evening, he said, a man in a van pulled in behind him and hopped out with a rifle in his hand. Mr. Vaughan recognized the man as a former neighbor. As Mr. Vaughan dashed for the side of his house, he was struck in the side of his right leg and fell to the ground.

Then, from about five feet away, the man fired shot after shot as Mr. Vaughan crept on his side, trying in vain to crawl under his minivan, to somehow find a reprieve from the indescribable sting he felt with each bullet that tore into his body.

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“You’re thinking clearer than you ever thought in your life,” Mr. Vaughan said during a recent interview. “I don’t know if it’s the adrenaline or just the will to live. You want to live more than anything in the world, and you know you have no control. I asked the Lord not to hit me in my heart and head.”

When the gunman stopped to reload, Mr. Vaughan said, he pulled himself to his feet and onto the hood of his minivan. But the man knocked him on his back with a shot to the abdomen, again from about five feet away, and continued shooting.

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The final shot, Mr. Vaughan said, entered his groin area and exited through his rectum, leaving him lying in a pool of blood and feces. He never lost consciousness.

“I wouldn’t close my eyes,” he said. “I kept telling myself, ‘If you close your eyes, you’ll go into shock, and you’re dead.’ ”

Mr. Vaughan said that he had an out-of-body experience while he was being shot — he felt as though he was watching the shooting from 15 feet away — and that he had God to thank for his survival.

“It was a plan that was way bigger than I am,” Mr. Vaughan said. “And why he saw fit for me to live and other people not to live, I can’t begin to answer that question.”

Two doctors who operated on Mr. Vaughan said his survival was unlike anything they had ever seen. Bullets barely missed several vital organs. Two were less than an inch from his heart.

“How you can get that many bullets in the chest, the groin, the abdomen and extremities and not have a lethal injury is pretty remarkable,” said Dr. Phillip Shadduck, the general surgeon at Durham Regional Hospital who operated on Mr. Vaughan. “He was very fortunate.”

The gun used to shoot Mr. Vaughan was a .22-caliber rifle, a firearm that is much less lethal than, say, the 9-millimeter handguns that detectives in the Bell case used, Dr. DiMaio said.

But Mr. Vaughan was shot at close range with nothing to shield him. In those cases, there is little one can do to mitigate damage, said Dr. DiMaio and Dr. Martin L. Fackler, a former military surgeon.

“The best thing, they say, is run,” Dr. DiMaio said.

If a gunshot victim’s heart is still beating upon arrival at a hospital, there is a 95 percent chance of survival, Dr. DiMaio said. (People shot in vital organs usually do not make it that far, he added.)

Shots to roughly 80 percent of targets on the body would not be fatal blows, Dr. Fackler said. Still, he added, it is like roulette.

Anybody who survives being shot, he said, “is lucky to be alive.”

Maelja on March 27th, 2019 at 13:06 UTC »

I work in an emergency department. Not only do you need to go to a hospital but a proper trauma center. I am not equipped to sort emergency vascular or cardio thoracic damage, nor do I have an appropriate amount of blood ready to go for major blood loss and we are a largish facility seeing 75k pt a year in our ED.

Ranikins2 on March 27th, 2019 at 12:03 UTC »

Why is santa the icon?

Jeffery95 on March 27th, 2019 at 08:08 UTC »

Generally its blood loss, or direct organ damage which is irrecoverable. Particularly internal bleeding.

Edit: When you get more karma from one comment than you had for the whole rest of your time on reddit