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 hurried into Howard – four women in their 40s, trembling and desperate to know his condition, among them his mother and godmother.
Each had been jolted awake by a pre-dawn phone call as word spread from the crime scene at 58th and Foote streets: Some dude had a gun; Day-Day got shot. Waiting silently in an ER conference room, they clung to hope: David had been shot before and had pulled through. And lately, he’d been brimming with good intentions, promising he was done with the hazards of the ‘hood – with the beefs, the bullets, the burials.
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