romma
Member
This is about as biased of an article I have ever read....
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Feb26/0,4670,WoundedbyGunfire,00.html
PHILADELPHIA — Antoine Rosenbaum, shot in the back by a stranger and paralyzed from the chest down, carries a heavy load for someone just 25.
So does Sophorina Wright as she gets him out of bed, cradles him in her arms and carries his 6-foot frame into their living room. There, the 21-year-old woman seats her husband gently on the sofa, arranges his legs, straightens his feet and settles down next to him to watch TV.
"She sacrificed a lot, because once I got shot she could have just said, `I can't do this, it's too much.' She stuck with me," Rosenbaum says. "That's my heart. She spoils me, she do."
Homicides have become the yardstick for measuring urban crime. But the far more numerous cases across America in which people are shot and wounded exact a terrible toll, too _ on the victims, of course, but also on their loved ones, the health care system, the social safety net and the economy.
"We like to think gun violence is someone else's problem, but it's everyone's problem," says Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist and co-author of two widely cited studies about the cost of gun violence in the United States.
Rosenbaum, for his part, was unemployed and had no insurance at the time he was shot. The cost of his daily care, medical treatment and rehabilitation is being picked up by the taxpayers and amounts to tens of thousands of dollars a year.
He and his wife live in a government-subsidized, handicapped-accessible apartment with extra-wide doors and hallways, easy-to-reach appliances and a linoleum floor crisscrossed with thin black tracks from Rosenbaum's wheelchair. Rosenbaum's wife gets $8.50 an hour as his full-time caregiver and also works part-time in a fast-food restaurant; he gets disability benefits and is also eligible for government programs that will pay for schooling and help him find a job.
Despite the government's considerable assistance, Rosenbaum's care places a huge responsibility on his wife. But she is tough and insists that it's really no big deal, that the only difficult job was rallying Rosenbaum in rehab and after he came home.
"I told him, 'You are not staying in that bed anymore. You have got to start getting up and getting out,'" she says.
___
More than 12,000 homicides by gun were reported in the United States in 2005. But the number who are wounded and survive gunshot assaults is much greater _ nearly 53,000 were treated in emergency rooms in 2006, the same federal database shows.
A report in the journal Spinal Cord a decade ago estimated the direct lifetime charges for every shooting victim at $600,000, or nearly $800,000 in today's dollars. Some estimates put the indirect costs, including lost wages and productivity, at double that amount.
In a 1999 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Cook and his colleagues concluded that gunshot injuries in the U.S. in 1994 produced $2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs. Taxpayers footed half of that through Medicaid, Medicare, workers' compensation and other government programs.
In a follow-up book, "Gun Violence: The Real Costs," published in 2000, Cook and Jens Ludwig estimated that gun violence costs the nation $100 billion a year, with medical costs only a small part of that.
Some gunshot victims recover fully and return to school and jobs and families. But many others face grim futures, and are forgotten.
Rosenbaum might have been among the lost if not for a pilot program in Philadelphia that seeks to give young gunshot victims a chance at a meaningful life. For some, case workers say, it's the first real opportunity they've had in their young lives.
___
May 6, 2006, was the last day he could walk.
He and an acquaintance were sitting on a porch when, in the middle of the afternoon, they were robbed at gunpoint. As they tried to flee, shots rang out, and on the sound of the fourth, Rosenbaum remembers falling.
"I didn't know I was shot. ... I was on the ground. I'm looking around and I tried to get up; my foot, my legs, nothing was responsive," he says. A bullet had hit him between the shoulder blades and struck his spine.
Police say he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person. They believe his companion, who was killed, was a gang member involved in a turf battle. He was one of more than 400 people murdered in Philadelphia that year, most by gunfire. Rosenbaum was one of four times that number _ about 1,600 _ who were shot and survived.
He spent a week in the hospital and then a month at a rehab center, where he was fitted with a hard plastic "clamshell" brace. The brace _ it still sits in his bedroom as a reminder _ covered his torso to prevent his spine from healing in a hunched-over position. It was painful, and came off only for bathing and sleeping.
He had to relearn how to dress, bathe, get out of bed and get into his wheelchair using only his arms.
He runs the risk of serious complications and has been hospitalized many times for infections, including once when, he says, a home visit caregiver ruptured his bladder while changing his catheter. Because of his paralysis, he didn't know anything was wrong until hours later, when he woke up drenched in sweat with excruciating pain in his shoulders, arms and head.
___
Social worker Nicole Nicholson says Rosenbaum is "my favorite, but I'm not supposed to say that."
"I've just watched him grow so much _ he's come 360 degrees," she says.
On a winter afternoon in March 2007, she arrives at his first-floor apartment in West Philadelphia after attending the funeral of another client, a young man who recovered from one shooting, only to be fatally shot in the chest not long afterward.
Nicholson is a case manager for the Philadelphia Health Management Corp., a nonprofit agency working with shooting survivors and their families as part of a state-funded pilot program that began just over two years ago.
The program, the Pennsylvania Injury Reporting and Intervention System, recruits 15- to 24-year-old shooting victims from three Philadelphia hospitals that account for nearly 40 percent of all firearm-related hospitalizations in the state.
The program seeks to help break the cycle of violence by gathering data on the many economic, educational, cultural, social, psychological and other factors that lead to shootings. The goal is better prevention programs. Researchers say it will take a few years before they can draw any conclusions.
Victims and their families also receive all-encompassing help from the program, including assistance with daily tasks, counseling, drug treatment, job training, and help in getting a Social Security card or birth certificate to apply for jobs.
"For some of the participants, being shot is just kind of another thing in a life that already was off track," says Doris Spears, a case manager supervisor. "To them it's like, `Other than dying, what else is going to possibly happen to me? I already can't get a job, the school thing didn't work out. Now I have kids, I'm in this bad neighborhood.'"
Rosenbaum's instinct, too, was to shut down. "When it first happened, he wouldn't talk, he wouldn't eat, he didn't let anyone touch him," Wright says.
Now he openly discusses his condition and maintains his own apartment.
___
One year after the shooting, Rosenbaum and Wright are married on a sunny warm afternoon under a gazebo in the back yard of a West Philadelphia wedding chapel. He wears a royal blue casual jacket, dress jeans and pristine white sneakers, she a frilly white cotton top and skirt.
"He is a wonderful son. He didn't deserve what happened to him," Diane Rosenbaum says amid the post-ceremony bustle of embraces and photographs. "But he's still here, he's still with us, and here he is _ a married man."
Guests head to Angora Terrace _ the street where Rosenbaum was shot _ for a reception at a friend's house.
___
Rosenbaum wants to move. There have been shootings and beatings in the neighborhood and, he says, a man in a wheelchair can't do much to protect himself. He also fears that the man who shot him might come back.
"I could see the dude any day," he says. "I don't know if he wants to finish me off, thinking I'm going to snitch on him."
Rosenbaum and Wright are now a family of four. This year, they gained custody of his 4-year-old son and Wright's 4-year-old nephew. He and Wright even dream of having a baby through in-vitro fertilization, if they can get into a safer neighborhood and if they can somehow afford it.
Rosenbaum is looking into doing volunteer work at a nearby educational center that offers courses in art and photography. He is waiting for the center's new elevator to pass inspection so he can get around in the building.
"There's a lot of opportunity, me being in that chair, where I don't have to just sit around," he says. "A lot of doors opened up for me."
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Feb26/0,4670,WoundedbyGunfire,00.html
PHILADELPHIA — Antoine Rosenbaum, shot in the back by a stranger and paralyzed from the chest down, carries a heavy load for someone just 25.
So does Sophorina Wright as she gets him out of bed, cradles him in her arms and carries his 6-foot frame into their living room. There, the 21-year-old woman seats her husband gently on the sofa, arranges his legs, straightens his feet and settles down next to him to watch TV.
"She sacrificed a lot, because once I got shot she could have just said, `I can't do this, it's too much.' She stuck with me," Rosenbaum says. "That's my heart. She spoils me, she do."
Homicides have become the yardstick for measuring urban crime. But the far more numerous cases across America in which people are shot and wounded exact a terrible toll, too _ on the victims, of course, but also on their loved ones, the health care system, the social safety net and the economy.
"We like to think gun violence is someone else's problem, but it's everyone's problem," says Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist and co-author of two widely cited studies about the cost of gun violence in the United States.
Rosenbaum, for his part, was unemployed and had no insurance at the time he was shot. The cost of his daily care, medical treatment and rehabilitation is being picked up by the taxpayers and amounts to tens of thousands of dollars a year.
He and his wife live in a government-subsidized, handicapped-accessible apartment with extra-wide doors and hallways, easy-to-reach appliances and a linoleum floor crisscrossed with thin black tracks from Rosenbaum's wheelchair. Rosenbaum's wife gets $8.50 an hour as his full-time caregiver and also works part-time in a fast-food restaurant; he gets disability benefits and is also eligible for government programs that will pay for schooling and help him find a job.
Despite the government's considerable assistance, Rosenbaum's care places a huge responsibility on his wife. But she is tough and insists that it's really no big deal, that the only difficult job was rallying Rosenbaum in rehab and after he came home.
"I told him, 'You are not staying in that bed anymore. You have got to start getting up and getting out,'" she says.
___
More than 12,000 homicides by gun were reported in the United States in 2005. But the number who are wounded and survive gunshot assaults is much greater _ nearly 53,000 were treated in emergency rooms in 2006, the same federal database shows.
A report in the journal Spinal Cord a decade ago estimated the direct lifetime charges for every shooting victim at $600,000, or nearly $800,000 in today's dollars. Some estimates put the indirect costs, including lost wages and productivity, at double that amount.
In a 1999 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Cook and his colleagues concluded that gunshot injuries in the U.S. in 1994 produced $2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs. Taxpayers footed half of that through Medicaid, Medicare, workers' compensation and other government programs.
In a follow-up book, "Gun Violence: The Real Costs," published in 2000, Cook and Jens Ludwig estimated that gun violence costs the nation $100 billion a year, with medical costs only a small part of that.
Some gunshot victims recover fully and return to school and jobs and families. But many others face grim futures, and are forgotten.
Rosenbaum might have been among the lost if not for a pilot program in Philadelphia that seeks to give young gunshot victims a chance at a meaningful life. For some, case workers say, it's the first real opportunity they've had in their young lives.
___
May 6, 2006, was the last day he could walk.
He and an acquaintance were sitting on a porch when, in the middle of the afternoon, they were robbed at gunpoint. As they tried to flee, shots rang out, and on the sound of the fourth, Rosenbaum remembers falling.
"I didn't know I was shot. ... I was on the ground. I'm looking around and I tried to get up; my foot, my legs, nothing was responsive," he says. A bullet had hit him between the shoulder blades and struck his spine.
Police say he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person. They believe his companion, who was killed, was a gang member involved in a turf battle. He was one of more than 400 people murdered in Philadelphia that year, most by gunfire. Rosenbaum was one of four times that number _ about 1,600 _ who were shot and survived.
He spent a week in the hospital and then a month at a rehab center, where he was fitted with a hard plastic "clamshell" brace. The brace _ it still sits in his bedroom as a reminder _ covered his torso to prevent his spine from healing in a hunched-over position. It was painful, and came off only for bathing and sleeping.
He had to relearn how to dress, bathe, get out of bed and get into his wheelchair using only his arms.
He runs the risk of serious complications and has been hospitalized many times for infections, including once when, he says, a home visit caregiver ruptured his bladder while changing his catheter. Because of his paralysis, he didn't know anything was wrong until hours later, when he woke up drenched in sweat with excruciating pain in his shoulders, arms and head.
___
Social worker Nicole Nicholson says Rosenbaum is "my favorite, but I'm not supposed to say that."
"I've just watched him grow so much _ he's come 360 degrees," she says.
On a winter afternoon in March 2007, she arrives at his first-floor apartment in West Philadelphia after attending the funeral of another client, a young man who recovered from one shooting, only to be fatally shot in the chest not long afterward.
Nicholson is a case manager for the Philadelphia Health Management Corp., a nonprofit agency working with shooting survivors and their families as part of a state-funded pilot program that began just over two years ago.
The program, the Pennsylvania Injury Reporting and Intervention System, recruits 15- to 24-year-old shooting victims from three Philadelphia hospitals that account for nearly 40 percent of all firearm-related hospitalizations in the state.
The program seeks to help break the cycle of violence by gathering data on the many economic, educational, cultural, social, psychological and other factors that lead to shootings. The goal is better prevention programs. Researchers say it will take a few years before they can draw any conclusions.
Victims and their families also receive all-encompassing help from the program, including assistance with daily tasks, counseling, drug treatment, job training, and help in getting a Social Security card or birth certificate to apply for jobs.
"For some of the participants, being shot is just kind of another thing in a life that already was off track," says Doris Spears, a case manager supervisor. "To them it's like, `Other than dying, what else is going to possibly happen to me? I already can't get a job, the school thing didn't work out. Now I have kids, I'm in this bad neighborhood.'"
Rosenbaum's instinct, too, was to shut down. "When it first happened, he wouldn't talk, he wouldn't eat, he didn't let anyone touch him," Wright says.
Now he openly discusses his condition and maintains his own apartment.
___
One year after the shooting, Rosenbaum and Wright are married on a sunny warm afternoon under a gazebo in the back yard of a West Philadelphia wedding chapel. He wears a royal blue casual jacket, dress jeans and pristine white sneakers, she a frilly white cotton top and skirt.
"He is a wonderful son. He didn't deserve what happened to him," Diane Rosenbaum says amid the post-ceremony bustle of embraces and photographs. "But he's still here, he's still with us, and here he is _ a married man."
Guests head to Angora Terrace _ the street where Rosenbaum was shot _ for a reception at a friend's house.
___
Rosenbaum wants to move. There have been shootings and beatings in the neighborhood and, he says, a man in a wheelchair can't do much to protect himself. He also fears that the man who shot him might come back.
"I could see the dude any day," he says. "I don't know if he wants to finish me off, thinking I'm going to snitch on him."
Rosenbaum and Wright are now a family of four. This year, they gained custody of his 4-year-old son and Wright's 4-year-old nephew. He and Wright even dream of having a baby through in-vitro fertilization, if they can get into a safer neighborhood and if they can somehow afford it.
Rosenbaum is looking into doing volunteer work at a nearby educational center that offers courses in art and photography. He is waiting for the center's new elevator to pass inspection so he can get around in the building.
"There's a lot of opportunity, me being in that chair, where I don't have to just sit around," he says. "A lot of doors opened up for me."
