Eleven times. That is how many bullets hit the 49-year-old woman this morning in North Philadelphia — and the number you need to hold onto is not eleven. It is the one that comes after it, the one the doctors at Temple University Hospital are working on right now: she is still alive.
The shooting happened just before ten o’clock this morning, on the 2800 block of North 20th Street — a residential block, rowhouses, people home, the middle of a Wednesday morning. The gunfire caught three people in and around one house. When it stopped, the woman, 49, had been shot eleven times, all through her body. A 27-year-old woman had been shot six times. A 29-year-old man had been shot three times in his right leg. Twenty bullets, three people, one block where families were starting their day.
There was no waiting for an ambulance. Philadelphia does something no other big city in America does as a matter of routine: its officers load the worst of the wounded into their own cars and drive. They call it scoop and run, and it has been written into department policy for more than twenty-five years — if somebody is shot or stabbed, you do not stand over them waiting on a medic unit, you take them to the nearest trauma center yourself. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied thousands of these rides and found the thing the officers already knew in their bones: for the most severely shot patients, the back of a police car is the fastest medicine there is, and those patients come out the other side of it more often. That is how all three victims got to Temple University Hospital this morning — in police cars, sirens up North Broad Street, minutes after the last shot.
And Temple is where you would want to land. It is a Level I trauma center, the busiest hospital for gunshot patients in the whole state of Pennsylvania — a place where the trauma teams have treated so many shootings that a Wednesday morning like this one is, heartbreakingly, a thing they know how to do. Most of the gunshot victims who come through those doors arrive exactly the way these three did: carried in by police.
Here is where the count stands. The 29-year-old man, shot three times in the leg — stable. The 27-year-old woman, shot six times — stable. Six bullets, and she is stable, which tells you something about her. And the 49-year-old is in critical condition, which is the hospital’s way of saying the fight is on and nobody is making promises. Eleven times. People do not survive that by accident. If she comes through this, it will be because she refused to quit, because a trauma team got her in time, and because officers on North 20th Street decided their cars were the ambulance and her minutes mattered more than procedure.
What nobody can tell you yet is why. Police have not released the names of any of the three, and as of this afternoon they have released nothing about who did this — no suspect, no description, no arrests. What happened in and around that house, what a 49-year-old woman and two people in their twenties had to do with each other or with whoever pulled the trigger twenty times, is a story detectives are still putting together. Somebody on that block knows the missing part. Somebody heard it, somebody saw the running, somebody knows whose car rolled off North 20th Street just before ten this morning. The tip line is 215-686-TIPS, and it takes the call without your name attached to it.
What we know tonight is three people shot in broad daylight on a block where families live — and the oldest of the three, the one who took the worst of it, is still fighting. However this story ends, it will not be because the people it happened to gave up, and it will not be because the officers and surgeons who got hold of them this morning gave up either. Keep a thought for her tonight — and for the two who will carry their own count of scars out of Temple when they go home.
Brought to you by Team Murphy Media
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