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Gunshot Victim Hopes to Inspire
Randy Davis, a survivor of brain injury. Randy Davis, 36, seems like a regular guy. He works in corporate security. He lives in Longmont, Colorado with his wife, 14-year-old daughter and golden retriever. But Davis is, in his own words, is "a walking miracle." He was shot in the head twenty years ago this Nov. 3. Nine of 10 people who get shot in the head die. Many of the rest end up in wheelchairs.
"Brain injury is one of the most underreported injuries in the nation," Davis said. "Often it's not diagnosed until patients leave the hospital and their lives start falling apart."
On Nov. 3, 1984, Davis was a 16-year-old high-school junior with a mullet haircut and a weakness for the heavy metal band Judas Priest. Some schoolmates invited him to go target shooting in a nearby canyon. Davis had moved from rural Virginia and had experience with guns. He planned to enlist in the military after graduation. They walked into the canyon and shot at antifreeze jugs until dusk, when the rest of the group returned to their pickup. Davis stayed behind for a bit, enjoying his first moments in a forest in months.
He walked a different trail out of the canyon. As he emerged from the woods, at about 100 yards in front of the pickup's headlights one of the kids fired three shots with a semiautomatic Ruger 10/22 hunting rifle — at rocks, the boy said. One of the solid-tipped bullets missed Davis. A second grazed the left side of his head. The third struck a quarter-inch from his right eye. At 900 mph, the shot had the force of a dropped anvil, a doctor said. Davis remained conscious through excruciating pain, bleeding badly as the pickup raced to a nearby emergency room. His insides went cold. The bullet had crushed part of his eye socket and lodged in the right temporal lobe of his brain. Surgery left him with a scar that curls like a question mark from his hairline, behind his temple, and back in front of his ear. He was back in school in two weeks, but he wasn't well. The right temporal lobe plays a role in language processing and organizing sensory input. Spanish class may as well have been Greek. He managed to graduate, but was never quite the same.
The trauma had left him with post-traumatic stress disorder and critical-incident stress. He felt disfigured and isolated. "Psychologically and emotionally, I was beyond devastated," he said. He experienced fits of crying and intense anger, all part of mood swings common to traumatic-brain-injury victims. He had to focus harder when he spoke, which is still true today. The military wouldn't have him. He dropped out of college, moved back to Virginia, and by the early 1990s was working menial jobs when he came across an article by a brain-injury survivor in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It led him to the Brain Injury Association of America and the counseling and peer support he needed to move ahead with his life.
He went into law enforcement, graduating in 1995 with high honors and an associate's degree in criminal justice. He has patrolled the streets for the Richmond Sheriff's Department, the Norfolk Police Department, and the town of Alma in Colorado. He was a federal marshal at the U.S. Department of Commerce's Boulder Laboratories. Now he works corporate security in Denver. It took 10 years to get back on his feet, he said.
Davis isn't planning on a big celebration of his 20 years of improbable survival. He just hopes his story can inspire survivors suffering through the early stages of traumatic brain injury. "I know there are other survivors who are like I was," Davis said. "I want to let them know there's hope that they can live a normal life."
Todd Neff is a staff writer with the Boulder Daily Camera - Boulder,CO,USA