Posted on 01/25/2005 11:13:02 PM PST by LadyShallott
A 14-year-old honor student from Briggs High School may be paralyzed for life after being shot in the face Monday night by a close friend.
As Billy George lay in a hospital bed, unable to move, his friend he has know since the age of four was sitting behind bars. Raymond Sims, 16, is charged with shooting Billy George. Friends say Sims had been flashing a gun all Monday, and then pulled the trigger just before 10 p.m.
The teens were at Billy's Brehl Avenue home on the west side of Columbus all day Monday. Billy's mother had the flu.
“I'd been in bed all day long. I woke up to a gunshot,” Deborah George told 10TV.
Then she heard Billy's girlfriend shriek in horror.
“I kept screaming ‘you shot Billy! You shot Billy!” Melissa Kroah said.
On the bathroom floor, Deborah George saw her son lying motionless, bleeding and only able to mumble.
“I don't know if he kept saying ‘help me. Mom’ or ‘help me.’ I don’t know what he was saying. I feel so bad that I don’t know what he was saying to me,” George said outside Children’s Hospital on Tuesday.
Melissa Kroah was brushing her hair in the bathroom just before the shot was fired.
“All of a sudden, I was looking in the mirror and I saw Raymond’s hand. And he just had it up and I saw the gun, and he had his finger on the trigger. And I just heard a loud boom, and I looked at Billy and he was bleeding,” Kroah said through tears.
She indicated she didn’t think there was any way it could have been an accident.
Doctors at Children's Hospital told the family on Tuesday that it would be 48 hours before they would know whether the bullet severed Billy's spinal chord. The boy’s mother fears her son will never move again.
“He was an artist… a basketball player. He dreamed of being in the NBA. A straight ‘A’ student. They showed me his record at school. I mean every grade - straight A's," George said about her son's ambitions and achievements.
His girlfriend wonders how a friendship could turn so violent so fast.
“He just pulled it out and just shot him, and I don't understand why,” Kroah said of Sims.
According to court records, Raymond Sims did not make a statement to police. He was being charged with felonious assault with a gun.
And this is not his first brush with the law. Earlier in January, Sims was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. He is also on probation for attempted receiving stolen property.
When, a kid beats his girlfriend with a baseball bat to kill her baby and cause a miscarriage, the liberals say that the kids don't have enough access to education about abortion, when any accident happens involving a firearm, do they look to educate people about firearm safety? I think you see where I'm coming from...
Ping.
BTTT
Drug-addled feral youth?
I've know two young males that were affected like this. One was a friend's brother back in the 1980's. He was about the age of this boy at the time. An older cousin (around 17 or so) of his friend was visting from CA and decided to show the boys a "real gun"--the younger boys were playing with BB guns. Shot him right in the neck and he has been a quadraplegic since--he is in his 30's now.
Then in 2002, an 11-year old former neighbor had nothing to do one Friday night so he tagged along with his sister to her friend's house. The friend was a boy of 16 or so and for some unknown reason he decided to show off his parent's gun and pull the trigger while pointed at the 11 year old. The 11 year old died right there. To make it even more tragic, the little boy had just made it to his 3 year recovery mark from leukemia.
oops--the second boy--the 11 year old--happened in 2003 not in 2002 not that it matters.
Firearm accidents are about lack of education too. This however, seems to be no accident. If the girl-friends story is correct, then the shooter should be tried as an adult and put away for a very long time.
If this kid was properly educate about firearms maybe this wouldn't have happened. I know if I were mad at someone as was going to off them i sure as hell wouldn't use a gun, just because I know how the media would handle it. I'd use an handle or tire iron. ;)
axe handle or tire iron*
Some think you have to blame the gun. I hope the shooter is tried as an adult.
The Bottoms remain The Bottoms...
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