Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [88]
Christina-Taylor was, by all accounts, very special. She served on her school’s student council and played on an all-boys baseball team. She was born on September 11, 2001, but never let the date of her birth define her. In the aftermath of her death, much would be made of the fact that she came into the world on a day marked by violence, and left the world on another tragic day. But those who loved her spoke of her urges “to be a 9/11 baby who represented hope and peace.” She carried herself with maturity and had a winning sense of humor. She was patriotic and loved wearing red, white, and blue. She liked to tell her parents, “We are so blessed. We have the best life.” What might she have offered the world if she had been given a chance to grow up?
The thirteen people who were injured at the Congress on Your Corner event included Suzi Hileman, shot three times while she tried to shield Christina-Taylor with her body. Ron Barber, Gabby’s district-office director, was shot in the face and leg. Gabby’s community-outreach coordinator, Pam Simon, sixty-three, was shot in the wrist and chest. One of the bullets lodged in her hip. Others were wounded in their arms, legs, feet, backs, and knees. A bullet grazed the head of a retired Army colonel. All of these victims, along with those who were murdered, were in a mostly enclosed space between concrete pillars and the wall of the Safeway. There was no easy escape.
After the shooter ran out of ammunition, he had tried to reload, but a woman named Patricia Maisch risked her life and grabbed the clip. Other constituents, Bill Badger and Roger Salzgeber, bravely fought the man to the ground. They held him down until police arrived. “You’re hurting my arm,” he said to them.
When emergency crews arrived, they found bodies and blood everywhere. It was chaos, with a lot of bystanders trying to do whatever they could. As three medical helicopters landed in the parking lot, paramedics had to figure out who was still alive, and of them, which victims were “immediates”—those who most urgently needed help. Seven of those alive, including Gabby, were deemed “immediate.”
After a paramedic named Colt Jackson got to Gabby, he asked her, “Can you hear me?” In response, she squeezed his hand. One of Gabby’s interns, twenty-year-old Daniel Hernandez, had remained at her side, his hand pressed against her head to contain her bleeding. As Daniel lifted Gabby up and cradled her, Ron Barber, on the ground and wounded in the face and leg, looked over at them. Ron noticed that Gabby’s skirt was hiked up in the wake of her fall, and he watched her pull down the skirt with her left hand. Gabby was always modest in how she dressed. While Ron tried to will himself not to pass out from blood loss, he thought to himself: “Maybe there’s a sliver of hope for Gabby. She’s still who she is, striving to remain modest even in the wake of a horrific injury.”
At about 10:40 a.m., Daniel accompanied Gabby to the ambulance, and she was rushed to the University Medical Center.
Meanwhile, nine-year-old Christina-Taylor was given CPR at the scene, and then loaded into a separate ambulance. Paramedics continued CPR on her during the ride to the hospital.
Medical guidelines suggest that shooting victims can be declared dead if they don’t respond after fifteen minutes of CPR. Christina-Taylor had been receiving CPR for more than twenty minutes when she arrived at the hospital, but given her age, doctors didn’t want to let her go without the most aggressive attempts to save her. After opening the little girl’s chest, Dr. Randall Friese, a trauma surgeon, used his hand to massage her heart. He had blood pumped into her heart through an IV line, but it wouldn’t beat. The chief resident took over and kept trying, as Dr. Friese learned that another severely injured victim had arrived.
That victim was Gabby.
When Dr. Friese reached Gabby, he took her left hand and twice asked her to squeeze it. Still conscious, she complied but could not follow his commands to squeeze her right hand. The brain injury had already