The robbers made him for a drug dealer. This is what he figured, at that instant, 2 o'clock Friday morning, May 11, face down in the grass of his grandmother's front yard, the world spinning and jagged and leaving him, drop by A-positive drop.

        For a few hours, they had watched him in PJ's, a nightclub on Reading Road. Two men wearing dark sweat shirts. They had seen the Lexus he was driving. They had noticed the Hennessy cognac he was buying for his friends. He had looked like a man with money.

        John Baker had gone to PJ's on the promise of a good time. He wasn't a regular. A friend from University Hospital, where Mr. Baker worked as a manager in the environmental services department, had suggested it. It was Ladies Night, he'd said.

        The robbers followed him to his grandmother's home in Bond Hill, where he was staying with his two sons. They put on ski masks and jumped him as he got out of his car.

        “Gimme your money,” said one.

        He gave them what he had, about $40. He gave them the gold ring from his finger and the gold bracelet from his wrist. “Worth less than $1,000,” he guesses. They wanted more.

        “Where's the rest? Where's the dope?”

        “I don't have no dope,” Mr. Baker said. “That's all I got.”

        They ordered him inside his grandmother's house, which was something he would not do, not with his grandmother and sons, ages 10 and 6, inside. He tried to run.

        One of his assailants grabbed him. The other fired several shots from a 9-millimeter pistol. A bullet hit one of the robbers in the neck. A few missed. One struck Mr. Baker on the left side of his lower back.

        A neighbor heard the shots and ran to the yard. He kept Mr. Baker conscious until the ambulance came.

        “I laid down on the ground then,” Mr. Baker, 33, recalled. “I said, please, God, don't let me die like this.”

Victims scarred for life

        At least 85 people have been shot in Cincinnati since the riots in mid-April. We see these numbers now, still being updated regularly, fit for radio sound bites and quick hits on TV, a mandatory line in the latest newspaper story about local people shooting each other.

        What number was John Baker, Woodward High School Class of 1986? He must have been near the front of the line. Dozens of incidents later, few people remember who was shot when or where they fall on the list.

        The frequency of shootings has declined significantly since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. But they still happen. They're still scarring for life people like John Baker.

        Every time he uses his right arm to help lift his paralyzed left leg out of bed, he remembers. For months after the shooting, each time his mother helped him shower or a friend helped him dress, or he prayed to God, thanking Him for that latest, promising wiggle in the toes of his left foot, he remembered.

        Violence has a face. John Baker wears it, pained, determined, desperate, wondering, as he goes through the therapy he hopes will help him walk again. He is a 210-pound man who struggles to lift 45 pounds of weight on an exercise machine.

        The numbers reveal the chaos, but they're too clinical to detail the tragedy. So here's one tragedy. One of at least 85. And counting.
       

What a bullet can do

        On impact, the metal sides of a hollow-point, 9mm bullet peel back like a banana, slivering into shrapnel-like fragments that spin and cut soft tissue like a table saw through a pot roast. The lead inside the bullet's casing is soft. It spreads when it hits something, creating a wider path of destruction.

        The 9mm is a large caliber bullet very good at killing people.

        At 2 a.m. on May 11, a 9mm bullet hit John Baker in his back. It touched his spinal cord and passed through the vena cava, before creasing the pancreas and exiting through his belly.

        Mr. Baker says getting shot is like being burned in a fire, then paralyzed by a distinct mixture of pain and fear. You hurt, you go numb, you pass out. He was lying on the grass, unable to move, hoping his assailants were not heading for the house.

        “Like a 1,000-pound weight on my body,” he recalls. “I thought I was dead.”
       

Trauma team goes to work

        At 2 that Friday morning, Dr. Jay Johannigman was on duty at University Hospital. He's an attending trauma surgeon. Despite the increase in gunshot violence, most of his work involves “blunt trauma,” the kind caused by vehicle accidents. Only 20 percent comes from the “penetrating trauma” of stabbings and gunshot wounds.

        But he has seen enough of the latter to know when it's bad. When Dr. Johannigman, St. Xavier High Class of 1975, returned to Cincinnati for his residency in 1983, most gunshot wounds came from small-caliber handguns, fired once. Now, most victims arrive with multiple wounds from large-caliber handguns, such as the 9mm wound John Baker suffered.

        Mr. Baker's heart was beating when emergency personnel brought him in, but his blood pressure barely registered. There are 15 operating rooms at University Hospital. One is always open. It's the one with the big red sign marked TRAUMA.

        In minutes, John Baker was there, his chest surgically sliced from belly to breast. “When I see a patient with a hole that starts in his back and comes out the front, that's life threatening until proven otherwise. With John, I have to be in the operating room, so I can put my hand on whatever's bleeding so quickly; he's trying to die,” Dr. Johannigman explains.

        He is part of a trauma team of more than 20 members — respiration therapists, radiology technicians, nurses, social workers and other surgeons — so he wants no special credit for saving a man's life that Friday night.

        But it was Dr. Johannigman's finger in the dime-sized hole in John Baker's vena cava, one of two major veins that return all the blood from the lower body to the heart, that kept him from bleeding to death.

        “I was losing his blood faster than I could keep it under control,” is how the doctor describes it.

        The average human body contains five liters of blood. In six hours, the trauma team replaced all of Mr. Baker's blood three times.

        Dr. Johannigman estimates 35 people worked to save Mr. Baker that night: Doctors, nurses, X-ray technicians, technicians from the Hoxworth Blood Center, anesthesiologists, a vascular surgeon to stop the internal bleeding.

        “This injury is deadly seven or eight times out of 10,” Dr. Johannigman says. “We could have lost him five or six times. John was a miracle. That's why you find people who work those long hours, because those miracles exist. In fact, John Baker is one of the reasons our hospital exists.”

        Mr. Baker was conscious when he arrived at the hospital. For the next six weeks, he was not. He plowed the field of the unconscious, remembering nothing, as teams of medical people patched him up. When he woke up, he couldn't move his legs.
       

Learning to walk again

        Connie Buda holds Mr. Baker's hands as he rocks back and forth, trying to strengthen the balance he once took for granted. She sits on a stool, he on a padded exercise table at the Drake Center. She is an occupational therapist, doing what she can to repair the damage of one spinning, fragmented 9mm bullet.

        More than three months after doctors saved his life, Mr. Baker still had less than 50 percent use of his right leg and no use of his left.

        He's making strides, though. He has been fitted for a brace. A week ago, he took a few, halting steps in a walker. “Hip-tossing my left leg,” he calls it.

        Just a few months ago, it took him two hours to get out of his bed, showered and dressed. Now, it's down to about 30 minutes. But his life remains a slow, painful exercise in arranging his nearly inert form to achieve the mundane tasks of the day.

        He's only beginning to bathe himself, dress himself and use the toilet without help. He lives at his mother's house, which until recently was not handicapped accessible. He used to play basketball, flag football and softball after work.

        For months after he was shot, the bathroom door was too narrow to accommodate his wheelchair, so Mr. Baker needed help getting from the wheelchair into a kitchen chair his family and friends had rigged with a set of wheels.

        Because there is a floorboard hump between the hall and the bathroom, someone had to lift each of the chair's wheels over the hump and into the bathroom.

        There is a ramp now, and the bathroom doorway has been widened. But if Mr. Baker wants to use the toilet, someone must help him from the chair. If he wants to bathe, someone must help him from the chair and up over the side of the tub. Someone must help him take his clothes off and put them on. Every time.
       

Every day is a workout

        He has lost his mobility, his dignity and his life as he knew it. He needs more surgery, to close permanently the hole in his stomach from the first surgery.

        “This is a workout,” Mr. Baker says to Ms. Buda. From a sitting position, he reaches down to his left, for a plastic cone on the floor, like a toddler reaching for a toy. Sometimes, he gets it on his own. Other times, Ms. Buda has to brace him, so he doesn't fall. “I'm getting nothing out of this (left) leg,” he says.

        They go on this way for an hour, three days a week. Mr. Baker reaches, extends and grasps, lifting small amounts of weight, performing a whole catalog of exercises the rest of us would take for granted. Ms. Buda supports him so he doesn't tumble. It's life lived in quarter-time.

        The hope is to get Mr. Baker out of the wheelchair and living independently. Ms. Buda wants him to “stop thinking about every little movement in your life you normally don't have to think about.”

        Until recently, he didn't have the trunk control to sit up without the support of a hard, plastic, shoulder-to-stomach brace.

        Will John Baker walk again?

        “He has some pretty good movement in the right leg,” Ms. Buda says, “but it's really hard to know. If he doesn't get any (movement) back in the one leg, he probably won't be a functional walker.”

        The week Ms. Buda began working with Mr. Baker, she also started with another gunshot victim, also hit in the spinal cord. That man is a quadriplegic, she says.
       

The sound of the bullet

        So it goes. John Baker is prisoner to a bullet.

        They wanted more money. He didn't have it. He ran. They shot him.

        They never caught the robbers, so now John Baker has nightmares that some day, the men will return. “I can still hear the sound of the bullet,” he says. The other week, his son dropped a tray to the floor. The sound of its crash made Mr. Baker sweat.

        He doesn't know many things — whether he will walk again or how he and his mother will pay the bills for the ramps and bathroom remodeling. He had just started a new job when he was shot; he was a day short of being eligible for medical and disability insurance.

        His claim for disability was denied, but his employer agreed to pay his doctor bills. That doesn't answer a question Mr. Baker asks himself every day: Will I ever stand to play catch with my sons?

        But he understands one thing. It's a clarity born of a 9mm bullet wound.

        “It's senseless,” he says. “All the shooting now. It's not even about drugs anymore. It's just guys being mad. They shoot you with no remorse. They took my money, took my jewelry and still shot me.

        “There's so much pain and suffering. People wouldn't do this, if they realized ... ” He lets the thought hang in the afternoon air, warm and blue.

        “John is thankful,” his mother, Carol, says. “He knows he shouldn't be here.” Carol Baker is a dialysis nurse. “When I first saw John lying there in the hospital bed, every horrible thing I ever saw with any patient came before me.”

Medical care for shooting victims costs millions

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