Paralysed gun victim might never go home
Shooting victim Ralph Burrows doesn’t know if he’ll ever get to go home.Aged 41, he’s had to accept he may spend the rest of his days in the extended care unit at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital.“That took a little while getting used to,” he says, with admirable understatement.Ralph is a man who has had to get his head around a lot lately. He was shot twice by an unknown assailant while riding a motorbike in the early hours of November 27 and is now paralysed from the neck down.He’s gone from being a man who was “always on the go” to a man who has had to stop doing pretty much everything he used to do.“I’m not used to being a person that sits still,” he says. “I can’t feed myself. I can’t bathe myself. I have a colostomy bag. I can move my arms [but] I don’t have the movement in my fingers. I need 24-hour care.”The bullet which severed Ralph’s spine is still in his neck, slowly leaking lead into his body as he gradually gets accustomed to staying still in a hospital bed.His new existence is a world away from his life before November 27, when he was a habitual drug user, committing crimes to get money to buy the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and alcohol he took “for years”.He did jail time for aggravated robbery and other violent offences, last serving a stretch in Westgate in 2007: 30 days on remand on a charge he can’t now remember.“I wasn’t no angel but nobody deserves to be shot,” he says. “Nobody deserves to be killed, murdered, stabbed or whatever. I always used my fists.”Detectives say he was riding a stolen motorbike when he was gunned down on Mission Lane, Pembroke, though Ralph says it belonged to the friend he was towing, a 44-year-old man who was also shot but suffered much less serious injuries.“I was coming from North Shore to come out of 42nd,” he recalls. “I heard shots and I heard him [the friend] screaming and then I realised I had lost control of the bike.“I never felt the bullet. It must have hit my spine. He [the friend] had all the pain. He was on the ground, screaming and shouting.“I was just trying to calm him down, tell him to stop shouting.“I had some people come to help me because I was kind of choking on my own blood. Some people raised my head up. I didn’t even know I had been shot because I never felt anything.“I was just lying there but I heard the blood trickling out of my neck on the ground.”He says he never saw who fired the bullets that struck him on his neck and his left foot and doesn’t know why he would have been a target for either “Parkside” or “42”: the two Pembroke gangs locked in deadly conflict.“I wasn’t involved in all that gang stuff,” he insists. “I could go to both places, between Court Street and 42nd. I was cool with both sides. But then, they don’t see it that way.“If you go over that side, they are young, so they are thinking you are a traitor. They are young guys who don’t have no common sense.”He remembers the ambulance coming and then getting to the emergency room at KEMH. “I just remember a doctor saying that my neck was swelling and my airway was closing up. They had to put me out.”He woke in the intensive care unit a day or two later and found out he was paralysed after another week in hospital.“Nobody wanted to tell me, really,” he says. “I told the doctor ‘I can’t feel my legs’ and he told me ‘you are paralysed, you know’. I cried.”The first few months were tough, Ralph says. “I wasn’t getting better, I was getting worse. I was angry every day. I just wanted to die. I didn’t want nobody to even touch me.“I was cursing every day, swearing, screaming out, talking out to the people who shot me: ‘You are a bunch of cowards’. I used to scream that out every day: ‘What did I do to you? What have I done?’”His mother Elizabeth, who brings him a home-cooked meal to hospital every day, says she knew when he was “getting ready to lose it”.“He would start singing hymns,” she explains. “Believe it or not, he has a lot of spiritualism in him. He would start singing hymns and I would get very upset and frightened.“I would get really, really upset because then the tears started coming and then he’d say ‘Momma, why did they do this to me?’”She adds: “It hurt me so much. A lot of times I had to leave because I couldn’t stop crying. I broke down every week.”His rage and anguish has now subsided, Ralph says, thanks to the love and support he’s received from his mother, his 20-year-old son and other close family members, as well as because he has given his heart to God.The single parent even finds comfort in chatting to his barber, a Christian, when he pays a visit. “It’s not about the haircut. It’s about the fellowship with the brother.”Ralph exudes an air of calm acceptance as he says: “I’m at peace now. I pray a lot. I have a lot of people praying for me. I used to pray even when I was on the street doing crimes.“I think that’s what kept me so long not getting hurt and stuff. I have had a lot of opportunities to slow down and now I have said ‘I guess this is it’. Everything happens for a reason.”Such is his faith, that even though he has been told by doctors he will never walk again, Ralph refuses to “own” that prognosis.“That’s not up to them; that’s up to the Father,” he says. “Anything could happen and I have seen it happen.”His mother confirms he’s not given up. His aunt got him a laptop with voice-activated controls and Elizabeth set him up on Facebook to give him contact with the outside world.She says he loves nothing more than for people to reach out to him on his wall. Sometimes, she leaves the room while he’s online but peeks back in at him. “I see his hand trying to use the pad. One thing is he’s very determined. He’s not just going to lie there.”Though Elizabeth goes to church, she can’t forgive those responsible for her son’s situation.“He says he forgives the person that shot him; I don’t,” she says. “It’s hard, it’s really, really hard. I feel for those whose children have died because I watched him, not knowing at one point if I was going to lose him. I watched him drop 60lbs.“I watched him go down to the point where his bones were sticking out and I cried and I cried and I cried.”She adds: “My heart goes out to those parents who have lost their children to gun violence. When I hear about it my whole body [is affected]. I break out in goosebumps, my head hurts. It’s just awful.“I know how I felt when I got the phone call when my son was shot.”She believes Ralph, who attended Francis Patton, Heron Bay and Warwick Secondary schools, has suffered the worst injuries of any surviving gun victim since the latest spate of shootings began almost two years ago.Yet she says the November 27 incident barely made a ripple in the news and she worries about the police inquiry.“I have called them. I call them to find out what’s what. Someone is always saying they’ll get back to you but, of course, they don’t. Ralph wasn’t a perfect person. He done drugs. He had been in trouble before.“To me, they act like he’s one less person you have to worry about on the streets.”Ralph says he hasn’t heard from detectives since he left intensive care. “They think it was guys after somebody else and I was a mistake,” he says. “They thought it was Parkside taking a shot at 42nd. It would be nice to get an update.”Asked if he has a message for those gang members still firing bullets, he says he’s not sure they are listening.“A lot of times those kids are looking for something. I don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it is.“I just wish it would stop because people are not feeling safe in their own country. I feel fear for people in my family. Sooner or later, they are going to just start hitting innocent bystanders. They are going to start hitting children.”His own close call with death has forced him to give up his criminal lifestyle and start again something previous incidents, including being chopped with machetes in 2009 and having a life-threatening bike accident, never managed.“It’s cleaned me up,” he says. “I was using drugs. Now I’m clean. I don’t even have a desire.”Before he was struck, Ralph used to hear gunshots at night and think: “Sheezh, another one.”“Now it’s hit home,” he says. “I’m one of them. It’s just that I survived.”A police spokesman said the investigation into the November 27 shooting was ongoing and encouraged anyone with information to call the Serious Crime Unit on 295-0011 or the independent, confidential Crime Stoppers Bermuda hotline on 800-8477.l Ralph’s family are raising money to buy him a motorised wheelchair costing thousands of dollars. Anyone interested in making a donation should contact him via his Facebook page.