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.
“I’d been shot in the leg in 2005. But I was in and out, and went back looking for revenge,” he said. “But this; I’ve lost 95 pounds. When I first got home I took off my shirt to take a shower and I cried. So when Richard came in, I listened. I still don’t like him though, he gets on my nerves.”
Wallace was “in the game,” slinging dope, money and bullets that dictated the life and death of many in Pittsburgh’s Black communities. Now he is part of the Gunshot Recurring Injury Prevention Service program. The GRIPS program seeks to intervene with gunshot victims while they are still in the hospital to break the cycle of retaliatory violence.
Principal Investigator Prof. Steven M. Albert said Pittsburgh is almost prefect for this study.
“We’re the right size,” he said. “This would be much harder to do in say, Chicago.”
Victims agree to take part in Pitt research, filling out questionnaires about their personal histories of violence, drug use
“If these patients agreed to talk with us, the first thing we ask is, ‘Is there someone out there who’s going to do something because you’re in here like this. If there is you have to call them now and stop it,’” Garland said. “But even if they say no, we still connect them with services.”
On the broadest scale, the GRIPS program gathers data on precisely that: does connecting victims of gun violence to services prevent future violence. It is the breadth of the service component GRIPS offers that makes this program different from past attempts at hospital-based intervention.
“What makes this different is we have buy-in from the hospitals,” said Garland. “We also have the city, the county, the Department of Human Services, probation and parole, and the district attorney’s office. We have people at the highest levels coordinating services to address these guys’ needs, whether that’s relocation, getting a GED, physical or mental health services, or a job.
Art Terry and Roland Slade Sr. work alongside Garland intervening with young Black “gang” victims directly in all four of the trauma units in the city. When hospitals get notified of an incoming gunshot victim, so do they, and one or more of them get to the scene.
“We know that almost all of these victims suffered a previous wounding,” said Terry. “So, if you can intervene when they are in the hospital, you’ve eliminated 50 percent of the problem.”
But UPMC Trauma Coordinator and Injury Prevention Specialist Leigh Frederick said it’s really a two-way street. By virtue of their connections “in the street” Garland and his team can alert hospitals to possible upticks resulting from particular shootings.
“They do a weekly ‘hot spot’ report; east, west, north and south, and it’s color coded. Green is good, orange means potential problems, and red means we can expect trauma victims,” said Frederick. “Not only that, it really helps when we have multiple victims from an incident. We had two guys come in within 20 minutes—and thanks to the guys, we knew in advance not to put them in the same unit. Before, we had no way to know when victims were allies or rivals.”
Frederick said of the nearly 50 shooting victims they’ve seen at UPMC trauma units, 30 have agreed to be part of the research program and have accepted services, and none have returned. They have also extended services to some of their family members.
That 60 percent success rate is impressive enough that GRIPS was sited for its work by directors of older, established programs in Los Angeles, and Baltimore GRIPS has only been “officially on line since May.
The fact that GRIPS is a data-driven research program, run through Pitt, gives it credibility and allowed it to attract the needed funding from the Heinz Endowments and the R. K. Mellon Foundation.
Its success can also bring a cost benefit to the hospitals. Most of these victims have no insurance. Just coming through the doors of a trauma unit with a gunshot wound, Garland said, costs $17,000 to $25,000. Before he got insurance, thanks to the program, Wallace’s surgeries and rehab totaled $1.2 million. The hospitals eat those costs.
But it hasn’t been all success. Garland said one guy who refused services was back 35 days later after another shooting. Then, Frederick recalled, there was “the guy with nine lives.”
“This guy had been shot so many times, he knew all the trauma doctors in the city on a first-name basis,” Frederick said. “We saw him six separate times; he refused to participate every time. The seventh time, he accepted.
But Garland pointed out, he did so too late: “He’s in a wheelchair now, paralyzed.”
That, said Wallace, is not going to be him.
“I’m taking a whole different route. My life is going to be great,” he said. “I’m ready to get out there and tell people, ‘you have a chance. I had a chance, and I’m taking it.’”
Wallace’s final surgery to reconnect his esophagus is scheduled for Dec. 23—a Christmas present.
For more information on GRIPS contact Richard Garland at 412-624-4631.
(Send comments to cmorrow@newpittsburghcourier.com.)
