16 people shot accidentally in Volusia-Flagler in 2018; some were children

A .45-caliber bullet pierced Amarion McDuffie’s chin, blasted his jawbone to bits and exited just below his right ear.

By the time Keosha McDuffie saw her 12-year-old son, there was so much blood she couldn’t pinpoint its source.

“His body was jumping on the stretcher, and they was ripping all his clothes off. He was crying,” Keosha said. “I was screaming and yelling.”

Earlier that afternoon, Amarion had asked permission to attend a sleepover with school friends across town from the McDuffies’ Daytona Beach apartment.

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Keosha felt uneasy when she pulled up to the host boy’s home on Jan. 6, 2018 — the last Saturday of Christmas vacation. The boy’s mother wasn’t there, and an adult tenant was babysitting.

“I never let (my kids) go nowhere unless it’s with immediate family,” said Keosha, a 36-year-old single mother of four. “The one time I let him go…” 

Amarion joined the more than 6,000 people in Florida treated each year for gunshot wounds. Daytona Beach’s Halifax Health Medical Center admitted 58 patients with gunshot wounds last year, Halifax Health spokeswoman Tangela Boyd said. That number excludes those discharged from the emergency room as well as those admitted for less than 24 hours who were not treated by the trauma team.

Survivors often are saddled with long-term physical and emotional burdens. And the staggering financial cost of treatment falls not only on the victims, but on the community. 

The News-Journal set out to compile and analyze every incident in which a person was shot in Volusia and Flagler counties over the course of 2018, the first such local study. No single source tracks every shooting, so the effort required that reporters make dozens of public records requests to 15 local law enforcement agencies in order to build a comprehensive list.

Of the 176 people shot locally last year, 16 were wounded in non-fatal firearm accidents.

The News-Journal attempted to contact each of them. Several, including Amarion and Keosha, agreed to share their stories.

Bullets and the body

After Amarion was shot, emergency responders transported him from his friend’s home to Halifax Health. 

The hospital, which treats most Volusia and Flagler shooting victims as well as some from surrounding counties, has an around-the-clock medical team, blood bank and operating room for trauma patients, said Dr. Dan Jazarevic, director of the hospital’s trauma department. The hospital brought in “Dr. J,” as colleagues call him, four years ago to upgrade its trauma treatment capabilities.

Keosha arrived as Halifax Health’s trauma team stabilized Amarion for air transport to Orlando’s Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children for surgery because of that facility’s expertise with pediatric patients. 

Doctors told Keosha her son’s condition could have been much worse, but his strong jawbone forced the bullet that struck his chin outward and away from his carotid artery.

Such impossible-to-predict variables make gunshot wounds much trickier to assess than other penetrating injuries, Jazarevic said. A knife wound, for instance, is contained to an area the size of the blade, but bullets can burrow into a blood vessel, flow away from the entry point and inflict widespread damage.

“A round enters here — may go up, may go down, may go left, may go right, make a turn — you don’t know where it’s going to end up,” Jazarevic said in a thick Croatian accent. “Sometimes you get shot in the abdomen and we find the bullet down by the foot.”

Numerous factors determine the severity of a victim’s injuries. Was an internal organ perforated? Was a major artery punctured? What caliber was the bullet? From which angle did it enter the body?

And misconceptions abound.

“(People think), ‘Oh, you got shot in the heart. You will die,’ ” Jazarevic said. “No, not necessarily. I’ll open your chest real fast, I’ll probably stop (the bleeding) and fix the hole in there and you’ll be fine.”

A punctured lung may not be fatal, either, because the bleeding stops on its own. On the other hand, he said, “An injury to the major (blood) vessel of the leg will kill you if you don’t come to a hospital because you will bleed to death on the street.”

A common belief, perpetuated by Hollywood, is that gunshot victims must undergo surgery to remove bullets or shrapnel lodged in their bodies.

“Only in movies (do) we take bullets out,” Jazarevic said, unless they’re causing further harm or discomfort. “(A round) can do bad things going in and coming out. But once there, it’s in tissue and doesn’t matter. You can leave it there.”

And there are freak incidents, too, in which people survive suicidal shots to the head or, in Amarion’s case, a close-range bullet to the face.

‘Every angel touching his body’

Keosha didn’t know her son’s friend had access to a gun when she dropped him off at the sleepover.

The boys had been playing the video game “Grand Theft Auto V” together online, and Amarion’s friend boasted that his mother owned a real version of the virtual gun they fired in the game — a Rossi Ranch Hand Model 92.

At the house, the boy and Amarion went to the master bedroom where the gun was stored in a closet. The other boy retrieved the gun from a shelf and it fired. Volusia County Sheriff’s Office deputies determined the shooting was accidental, according to an incident report. 

“I was in shock,” said Amarion, now 13. “I tasted the blood in my mouth.”

That’s when he realized he’d been shot and ran to the babysitter for help. The man had been listening to music and didn’t hear the disturbance, the report states.

“I had to call (9-1-1) myself,” Amarion said.

Keosha’s initial disbelief when a nurse called to deliver the details soon shifted to panic.

“Of course there’s me in danger, running every light trying to get to the hospital,” she said. She rushed through lobby security, obtained a visitor ID and ran to the trauma room where she found her son bloody and crying — but alive.

“I swear he had every angel touching his body,” Keosha said. “His jawbone can be replaced. Teeth can be replaced.”

And they’ll need to be. But that will come later.

At Arnold Palmer, a medical team drained the bullet hole below Amarion’s ear, plucked scattered shards of teeth and bone from his mouth and throat, stitched up the entry wound on his chin and wired his jaw shut. 

“The doctors couldn’t even describe how many pieces were shattered in his mouth,” Keosha said. “They didn’t want him to wake up and choke.”

After surgery, a tube drained fluids from Amarion’s neck for five days. And then Keosha took him home.

He was stable, but not out of danger.

“The only thing they said could make it get life-threatening was if I did not take care of him and he got an infection,” Keosha said.

She bought bandages and a blender to make shakes and smoothies he could drink through a straw. About a week after returning home, Amarion collapsed in the kitchen. He wasn’t getting the nourishment he needed from those liquid meals.

“He was drinking Ensure, but he needed me to blend up broccoli. I saw him shaking,” Keosha said. “That scared me.”

She quit her retail job to nurse him full time, and her father helped her pay the bills for two months until she felt it was safe to return to work.

Amarion missed the whole spring semester at Campbell Middle School. He underwent a second surgery six weeks after the shooting.

“He was still tasting the bullet, so they had to go in and wash his mouth out and make sure there was no pieces of the bullet left in there,” Keosha said. They also removed the wires.

“The first thing he asked the doctor when he came out of the second surgery was, ‘Can I eat?’”

Amarion graduated to soft food but still can only chew on the left side of his mouth — the lower right side is nothing but tissue.

Shootings’ costs: Flesh and $5 billion

More than a year after the shooting, Keosha has yet to receive a medical bill. She anticipates a big assist from Medicaid. But that won’t cover her out-of-pocket costs for the blender, the bandages, a baby-sitter, the special food, the lost wages or the gas for round trips to Orlando.

The direct cost of the 6,000-plus shootings in Florida each year — which includes health care, law enforcement and court expenses, costs to employers and lost income — is more than $5 billion, and approximately $950 million of that burden falls on taxpayers, according to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2018 report, “The Economic Cost of Gun Violence in Florida.”

Amarion endured an unexpected surgery in February to extract shards of bone and misshapen teeth that were cutting through his gums. And he still faces another major operation to rebuild his jawbone using bone from his hip, but doctors want to watch how his jaw grows back on its own first. Then he’ll need teeth implants.

The whole ordeal has left an emotional and social imprint on him as well.

In the shooting’s wake, “my face looked fat,” Amarion said, and he had an eye-catching bandage on his neck for a while. “I wore a hoodie because I didn’t feel like explaining myself to people.”

He wouldn’t leave the house with his head uncovered. He had to get glasses, and “everyone he looked at he was scared of,” Keosha said.

His demeanor has changed, too. “He’s more to himself now. All the energy he used to have, he just don’t have all that anymore,” she said.

She moved her family to Port Orange — and a different school zone — to keep Amarion from crossing paths with his former schoolmates.

The mother of the boy who shot Amarion was charged with improper storage of a firearm and sentenced to six months of probation. 

Her time has been served, but the repercussions for Keosha’s family continue to surface. “We’re living in 2018. We know that’s not fair,” Keosha said. “As time goes on you think, ‘Oh my God, this ain’t right.’ ”

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