On Halloween, 2013, Christopher “Biggy” Wallace walked into a Wilkinsburg barbershop for a haircut.
He didn’t walk back out.
As he sat in the chair two men ran in and started shooting. By the time they ran out, Wallace was lying on the floor bleeding from 14 separate bullet wounds, most to his chest and abdomen.
“I remember a voice in my head saying ‘keep breathing. If you stop breathing, you die,’” he said. “I was still saying that when I woke up.”
That was three weeks later—Wallace had been kept sedated after leaving the emergency room so he could heal in preparation for additional surgeries. The physical trauma included a perforated lung and liver, but the most debilitating was the bullet that nicked his esophagus—it had to be surgically severed so it wouldn’t tear beyond repair.
The result is that Wallace hasn’t eaten solid food in more than a year. So when he was approached by Richard Garland of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health about joining a gunshot prevention research program, Wallace said yes immediately.
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