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Three weeks, 10 gunshot slayings
As county's firearms violence and homicide rate rise, experts worry: Is this a blip, or the start of an ugly trend?
By Dorsey Griffith and Christina Jewett -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, April 3, 2006
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee
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Jai Anton Westbrook. Hector Manuel Barrera. Michael Daly. John Johnson. Ralph Joseph Reynoso. German Mendoza. Jack Maurice Lawrence. Carlos Gene Morales. Gamaliel Ortega Torres. Phuong Van Le.
All 10, six still teenagers, were shot and killed in Sacramento County within a three-week span last month.
The spate of gun violence might be a blip, or it could signal that last year's surge in gun violence marked the start of an ominous trend.
The number of gunshot victims taken to the UC Davis Trauma Center rose 20 percent in 2005, and the first three months of 2006 show a similar increase.
James Ramirez was the first shooting victim of the year, killed by an unknown assailant on the doorstep of his South Land Park home just before dawn on Jan. 3.
His death has turned his mother's life upside down, her grief and shock still fresh months later.
"To have something so violent and so senseless come into our home like that - you can't explain it," Barbara Ramirez said tearfully.
Since her son's death, Ramirez has been unable to work. Her daily life is an exercise in mourning: Her day begins with Mass at 8 a.m., and goes on to homicide support group meetings and grief counseling.
Ramirez wears two necklaces and a bracelet with her son's image and looks at his prom photo in her bedroom every day when she rises and when she goes to bed.
"It's about having a routine that makes you get through to the next day," she said.
So far this year, gun violence is rising in tandem with the county's homicide rate. The number of homicides in Sacramento County during the first three months of 2006 is up 20 percent over the same period last year, with 30 people slain in January, February and March, compared with 25 during the same period last year, according to data provided by the Sacramento County Coroner's Office.
In the city of Sacramento, the homicide numbers are slightly down this year, from 11 between January and March of 2005 to eight so far in 2006. Six of those slayings, however, were in March.
"There's no basis for (the countywide jump)," Sacramento police spokesman Sgt. Terrell Marshall said. "I don't think you could find a sociologist, criminologist or psychologist who could say why this occurred - (last) month just happened to be a violent month."
Numbers gathered at the UC Davis trauma center over the past five years offer a longer view.
While the center treated between 250 and 260 gunshot victims each year between 2000 and 2004, that number surged to 307 in 2005, representing a 20 percent increase, said Dr. Felix Battistella, trauma surgery chief at UC Davis Medical Center.
A similar pattern emerges from data from the first three months of each of the past five years. While the numbers fluctuated between 57 and 68 in the period between Jan. 1 and March 31 in each of the years 2000-05, the trauma center has seen 81 shooting victims so far this year, an increase of more than 19 percent.
"It seems like Sacramento just went bad," said Meadowview resident Joanneisa Hill, 36, whose son, 19-year-old Carlos Morales, was killed in a gun accident March 6. "I've never seen so much death and destruction. This is crazy."
Dr. Garen Wintemute, a UC Davis emergency room physician and a national gun violence expert, said it's impossible to say whether Sacramento County's recent experience is part of a general national upswing in gun violence.
He said it's not far-fetched, however, to suggest that changes in federal gun policies have made an increase more likely.
Wintemute cited as examples the federal government's failure to extend the assault weapons ban and new restrictions on law enforcement access to data on weapons used in crimes.
Gun violence peaked in the early 1990s, then plummeted to the lowest levels seen since the 1960s. Rates of gun violence bottomed in 2000 and have remained steady since, he said.
"An increase in gun violence may be upon us just as we are putting in place policies that will make that rise in violence harder to deal with," he said. "It's too soon to say for sure."
Either way, he said, the impact of gun violence ripples through society.
"Whether real or not, a perceived rise in violence affects the community," he said. "In some cases, people become less willing to participate in community life. Levels of fear rise, and the sense of quality of life decreases."
Shootings also affect the ranks of responders whose lives intersect with violence, whether they are paramedics, surgeons, police officers or sheriff's deputies.
In the space of three hours on March 25, Sacramento County sheriff's deputies and investigators dealt with two of the most violent incidents they've seen.
The first call came at 7:45 p.m. A gunman on Elk Grove's Laguna Boulevard was shooting people at random. When it was over, one man was dead, another fatally wounded and one miraculously alive despite being shot 14 times.
The suspect was stopped only when deputies fired their own weapons, critically wounding him.
Even as detectives were making sense of that rampage, a gang shootout began seven miles north in the Fruitridge area. One man was killed, and two were hospitalized.
The hail of bullets pierced surrounding homes and parked cars.
For responders, the toll goes beyond strained resources. Chad Augustin, a Sacramento fire captain and paramedic, has been at the center of chaotic crime scenes, surrounded by wailing family members, trying to save a life while taking care to preserve a crime scene.
But the quiet moments and words exchanged with victims amid the chaos stand out most.
"I've had a husband ask me to 'Tell my wife I love her,' " before he died, Augustin said. "It's heart-wrenching."
When shooting victims do survive the trip to the hospital, it's a race against time to keep them alive, doctors said.
"About 10 people leave whatever they are doing and wait for the person to arrive," emergency doctor Wintemute said. "Everything gets done at once in hopes that if there is massive bleeding going on, we can catch it in the first five minutes."
The team hovering over a gunshot victim works at full speed, looking for injuries: Is the victim breathing? Is the airway free? Is the blood circulating? Can the victim move? Follow commands?
Depending on what doctors find in those first few seconds, the ER team inserts tubes that go into the victim's chest to re-expand lungs, into the bladder to drain urine, into the throat to get oxygen to the lungs.
"If there is a penetrating injury to the chest and the patient has a heartbeat and no pulse, they might open the chest and pump the heart by hand," Wintemute said.
Surgeons don't know what to expect when they open up a victim: Bullets don't know how to navigate around key blood vessels or vital organs; some are designed specifically to splay open once they penetrate the body.
"No gunshot wound is alike," Battistella said. "The path of the bullet is very different from patient to patient. Each presents its own unique challenge."
Witnessing the agony presents its own challenges - for the trauma team, doctors said.
"It doesn't get any easier from the standpoint of seeing someone suffer," Battistella said.
Even the most experienced, hard-boiled emergency responders have a gut response to senseless violence.
Said Wintemute: "You get used to not getting used to it."
About the writer:
The Bee's Dorsey Griffith can be reached at (916) 321-1089 or
dgriffith@sacbee.com.
