Another Child Fatherless

Paul Duggan: For 16 minutes, doctors in an emergency room treatment bay called Trauma 1 worked urgently to resuscitate the patient, a gunshot victim with no vital signs and a wound so grievous that saving him would have amounted to a resurrection.

David Robinson's life had all but officially ended even before an ambulance crew wheeled him into Howard University Hospital that winter morning in 2012. A bullet fired on a dark street in Northeast Washington had severed his aorta, and surgeon Wendy Ricketts Greene knew that nothing in medical science could bring him back. Glancing at the wall clock, she noted the time, 3:13 a.m., and pronounced the young man dead.

Four of his loved ones soon hurrie…