Path of a Bullet

Three hours short of his 17th birthday, Martine Perry is lying naked on a stainless steel hospital table, life seeping out of his body.

A baby wails in a distant corner of the emergency room. An elderly woman pleads with a nurse to hold off putting a tube down her throat. And Martine lies silent, motionless, blood oozing from his head, as eight people work frantically to revive him.

“Do we have a pulse?”

“I need a 6-2.”

“You aren't going to get an H and H on that.”

“Can you feel the membrane?”

“How are his pupils?”

“They were fixed and dilated in the field. I don't think they've gotten any better.”

“I want a skull and chest right now.”

“We're going to crack this guy, right?”

“We are?”

“Well, I don't know where the bullet's gone.”

The bullet.

Where's the bullet?

And what damage has been churned in its wake?

Earlier this night, as many nights, a bullet was released. And the target was a human being.

A finger tightened on a trigger.

A firing pin struck an explosive charge, blasting a lead projectile through a gun barrel at 780 miles per hour.

When a bullet slams through a human being, it cartwheels through flesh, perhaps chewing its way through bones -- or worse, organs. It can tear chunks eight times its size from whatever is in its way.

The path of a bullet is never clean or uncomplicated.

That moment when a person chooses to kill another and pulls the trigger will immediately have an impact on dozens of people. Ultimately, that bullet will hit even you and me.

To show the devastation caused by a single bullet, the Press-Telegram followed the shooting of Martine Perry from the streets of Central Long Beach to the hospital emergency room and into the criminal justice system.

One squeeze of a trigger has tremendous costs that go far beyond the shooter and victim, their families and friends.

There is an emotional cost for each person directly involved in the case.

All of us pay a societal cost measured in fear, anger and mistrust. And of course, there's the financial cost.

The Press-Telegram estimated the financial cost of the Martine Perry shooting and found the primary economic costs -- including treatment and transportation by paramedics, emergency room care, and the police investigation as well as the estimated costs involved in jailing the suspects and bringing them to trial sometime next year -- was more than $167,000. Almost all of it absorbed by local institutions.

Add long-term incarceration, if the four suspects are convicted, and the figure nears $2 million.

All the result of one squeeze of the trigger. One 22-cent bullet.

And our estimate of the cost is likely to be lower than an average shooting because, in this case, police made immediate arrests and there were no rehabilitation expenses for the victim.

Multiply $167,000 by the number of shootings in Long Beach and you begin to grasp how gunshots affect everyone in the city.

Although no official records on the number of gunshot incidents have been kept, experts estimate there are 250 to 300 shootings yearly in the city. In 1995, 66 of those shootings were homicides.

The immediate economic cost of gunshots in Long Beach alone could easily surpass $41 million a year.

Another Saturday night

It's 8:40 p.m., just after sunset on Saturday, Sept. 7.

At Fire Station 10 in Central Long Beach, the busiest of 23 stations in Long Beach, firefighters are studying, cleaning up after mealtime, watching a little television.

Waiting for another busy Saturday night.

Whenever someone is critically hurt, the fire engine rolls, carrying a captain, engineer/driver and two firefighters. And so does the rescue unit, with two paramedics. The large response is a safety measure for dealing with crowds and traffic.

And during a gunshot incident, there's always the need for an extra person to drive the rescue unit so both paramedics can work on the patient.

Responding to the kinds of calamities they deal with is mentally and emotionally draining work.

“When somebody's dying, you can look in their eyes and see they're not going to make it,” said Eric Erwin, a paramedic at Station 10. “There are shifts where in 24 hours you see both the beginning of life and the end of life. There are some mornings where I don't remember getting home.” He lives in Temecula, an hour and a half from Long Beach.

The emotional toll can be so intense that five years ago, the Long Beach Fire Department started a program called the Critical Stress Incident Debriefing, which provides mandatory counseling to firefighters and paramedics after particularly stressful events.

They also regularly rotate paramedics from rescue units to engines to give them breaks from the job of transporting victims.

On this night, at 8:40 p.m., with the “B” shift on duty, everything's quiet.

'Kicking it'

Four blocks away, at 15th Street and Gaviota Avenue, Martine Perry is hanging around with some friends. They're “kicking it.” That means they're passing time knocking back 40-ounce bottles of Budweiser and engaging in short bursts of conversation.

They are talking about heading to a party when they spot a burgundy Buick cruising toward them. It had done a slow pass earlier.

Being members of the Eastside Longos, one of Long Beach's biggest gangs, they tense up when they spot the car slowing for a second time. They squint at the windows, but see only darkness.

Suddenly, flashes of light.

Pop, pop, pop...

Gunfire spits out of the car. At least six or seven shots.

And the red car squeals away.

Within moments, at 8:47 p.m., the intercom crackles to life in Station 10.

“Engine 10, Rescue 10, stand by. Engine 10, Rescue 10, we have a Charlie (critical) response. Gunshot wound.”

In less than a minute, Engine 10 and Rescue 10 are racing toward the scene.

Long Beach police officers John Hotchkiss and Rob Braxton are cruising through the intersection of Willow Street and Magnolia Avenue when their radio sputters: “Respond to reports of shots at 15th and Gaviota....”

By the time they arrive, the call has changed to a “245 (assault with a deadly weapon) drive-by,” and finally a “929” (person down). They know this could be bad.

At St. Mary Medical Center, doctors and nurses begin preparing an area of the emergency room for trauma surgery.

In 'automatic mode'

Police, firefighters and paramedics make their way through 50 or so onlookers toward the still form on the littered sidewalk. It is 8:50 p.m. Dusk has settled solidly into darkness.

Adrenaline pumping, the officers go into what Braxton calls “automatic mode,” pushing aside any emotional response and focusing on their immediate job.

“When you get there, you have to do a quick evaluation: Is it a life-threatening injury?” said Braxton. “If it's life-threatening, you go into preserving the crime scene because it could end up as a homicide. It takes a lot of work to protect a crime scene, especially in an area like that, where a lot of people normally hang out.”

They push back the growing crowd, help set up a perimeter with yellow police tape and begin scanning the ground with black flashlights, searching for spent cartridges and bullet fragments.

Braxton and Hotchkiss are two of 48 police personnel who will eventually be involved in this case.

When paramedics Mark Veit and Jay Shaefer reach Martine, he is unconscious, lying face up, blood running out of his nose and seeping from somewhere in the back of his skull. The ground around his head is slick with blood.

The paramedics know immediately there is little they can do for him there.

The priority is to transport him as quickly as possible to the emergency room.

As the ambulance screams its way to St. Mary 14 blocks away, the two men work quickly and silently. Veit inserts IVs, tries to staunch the bleeding, and scrambles to find bullet damage. Shaefer works to keep the airway open.

Martine is wheeled into the emergency room at 8:55 p.m.

'There's no pulse'

Eight members of the trauma team -- a trauma surgeon, emergency physician, surgical resident, radiology technician, respiratory therapist and three nurses -- converge on him.

Questions and answers in the language of doctors sail through the cold room.

The evaluation of the seriousness of Martine's condition quickly shifts to establishing whether he has already died.

“There's no pulse.”

“He's got a rate of 80.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Hey, this guy's still warm.”

“Let's keep going.”

Martine remains unresponsive to treatment, and the focus shifts to the bullet. If it is lodged in an organ, that might explain Martine's deteriorating condition. They're hoping to find something -- anything -- that might be fixable.

Everyone is aware that time is running out.

“Where is the bullet? Where is the bullet?”

“Want to do anything beside the epis?”

“He's got blood in his abdomen. He's got blood in his abdomen.”

Suddenly, a doctor doing a more thorough examination of Martine's head finds the exit wound.

“It's a through and through,” he announces with resignation. “I didn't see that until now.”

The final question has been answered. There is no remaining bullet. Only its path through Martine's head.

He is not responding because the bullet shredded too much of his brain.

The green blips on the heart monitor are there only because of the CPR being given by nurses.

No amount of skill, medicine or technology could have saved him.

The emotional letdown in the room is perceptible.

But Dr. Mark Joyner, who had noted earlier Martine still felt warm, isn't ready to stop. He grabs the IV bag and climbs onto the table, hoping to create some blood pressure in Martine's body.

Now fighting to maintain the body in shape for possible organ donation, he squeezes the bag. But there's no blood pressure.

Finally, he steps down.

“I'm going to call this at 21:20,” he says, using military time to announce the time of death at 9:20 p.m.

Two hours and 40 minutes before his 17th birthday, 35 minutes after he was shot, Martine Perry's life officially ends. He is unclothed and alone on a blood-streaked table, partially covered by a white plastic body bag. His throat slit open for an airway tube, which remains obtrusively in place. A bloodied oxygen mask sits next to his mouth.

Just above his knee is a large green tattoo in Old English lettering: ESL. East Side Longos. The name of his gang.

When kids are shot

Once Joyner declares the efforts over, the trauma team disbands, cleans up and moves on. Some to attend other patients. Others to fill out reports.

“It's always tragic, especially to see kids shot,” Joyner says. “We see (wounds) in the chest, belly, head. In this case, he had a few vital signs and you always try to do whatever you can.”

“For me, I don't feel the emotional impact until I've had time to reflect,” says Dr. John McCall, one of the three doctors who worked on Martine. “As pieces of information (about the victim) come in, you feel the emotional impact.”

And the pieces of information quickly begin to slip in.

A picture of Martine Perry begins to emerge: His mother has been dead for years. The father was found at a bar. A brother is in jail.

Joyner, hospital social worker Deborah Schiewitzmsw, and Braxton head to the family waiting room. Inside are nine people, including Martine's father, Jack Perry.

Joyner approaches Perry to say the words a parent hopes to never hear: Sorry. Got bad news to tell you.

As three teen-age girls begin to sob, Perry leaps from his chair with arms raised, fists clenched. Joyner, startled, steps back and raises his arms.

But Perry's motions are simply an expression of grief, not anger. Perry's friends step forward to console him. Three boys in baggie pants rush out of the room, one punching the wall.

“He's the worst part of the job,” Joyner says later. “You see all these kids and you tend to forget that they've got families. In this job you get kind of -- I don't want to say nonchalant -- but you learn how to joke and try to make sure it doesn't overwhelm you. You develop a hard shell. If you're too emotionally worked up you can't think.

“But when it's kids, it's hard,” he continues. “And it doesn't have to be trauma. Some days I wake up and think it's almost cruel having kids these days. It doesn't seem society's getting any better.” Joyner has a daughter.

Perry asks to see his son. Despite Schiewitzmsw's concern that the scene may be too bloody, too traumatic, Perry insists and she escorts him to the body.

He stands over the cold form, silently, just looking, for an excruciatingly long two or three minutes.

Finally, the father steps away and says softly to Schiewitzmsw: “He wasn't a hard-core gangbanger. He didn't even carry a gun. But he knew this would happen. He kept saying, `Sooner or later, they're going to come for me in an ambulance.”

Perry pauses.

Then, in a breaking voice, says, “I loved my son. I loved him so much.”

The father moves back to his son, bends over him in a slow, gentle motion, and kisses him tenderly on the cheek.

The father's presence dramatically alters the hospital scene. Before Perry showed up, the police and caregivers could protect themselves behind a veneer of emotional disconnectedness.

“It really doesn't affect me until I see the family,” Hotchkiss says.

And the social worker, there to help the family deal with the emotional impact, is not immune herself.

“It's hard,” she says. “Families come in asking, `Why?' And there is no answer.”

Gangs and Scouts

Jack Perry isn't asking why, but rather, could it have been different?

He knew his son was involved in a gang. But felt powerless.

Four days after the killing, Perry sits in the one-bedroom apartment he and Martine shared and relates what he knows of his son's story.

A boy whose mother died of cancer when he was 6 was left to live alone with an alcoholic father. There were times when Perry had no job, times when Martine stayed with others -- four years with a half-sister at one point -- and times when Perry was near-suicidal, before finding religion.

Over the last two years, Perry saw signs of Martine's increased gang involvement. The buzz-cut hair. The baggy clothes.

“I couldn't afford to buy Martine many things,” says Perry, unemployed for 2 1/2 years. “But one day he showed up wearing a brand-new pair of expensive tennis shoes. I asked him, `Where did you get the shoes.' He never answered. But I knew.”

Perry believes one of his stepsons, an Eastside Longo named Alex, who regularly brought his gang friends around, helped draw Martine into gang life.

Martine's gang friends say it was less tangled than that: They all grew up as friends. And as they grew older, the neighborhood gang evolved naturally from the neighborhood clique.

However it happened, by age 16 Martine was a puzzle of contradictions.

He was a Boy Scout in Troop 25 -- for five years -- right up until last year. Despite the changing addresses and living arrangements, he kept making it to his Scout meetings.

Scoutmaster Andy Hale, who drove Martine to the meetings for those five years, says Martine's behavior made him a role model for other youngsters: a quiet leader who was inducted into the Scout honor group Tribe of Tahquitz when he was 15.

“I've had a reputation for taking boys nobody would take,” says Hale, who has been Scoutmaster for 17 years. “Send me a dozen Martines. He had the intelligence and aptitude to be successful. Successful in life. Successful as a husband and father.”

Hale says that during the time Martine was in the troop, he didn't show signs of gang membership. “He had no tattoos when I last had him in camp two years ago,” Hale says.

Martine was also a kid who saved, for 13 years and through countless moves, a book of pictures and poetry, handmade and held together by colored strings and ribbons. His grandmother gave it to him when he was 3 years old.

But to police, he was a known gangbanger who, at the very least, was into marijuana. He was arrested twice for it, the last time in May for sales and transportation. And Martine Perry, a.k.a. “Lil Stalker,” was also a witness to the beating death of a homeless man last year, allegedly at the hands of Martine's fellow gang members. He was the witness who never showed up in court, despite being served a subpoena.

In the end, all those images melted into a very clear, simple picture: a victim lying naked and dead on an emergency room table.

Unbelievable

As Perry sits alone in the apartment he once shared with Martine and continues telling his son's story, he explains that, despite the tragic ending, he feels no resentment toward the gang.

They were Martine's friends, he says. And they have been a major source of support after Martine's death, dropping by regularly to speak with him.

The gang has even offered to pay for the funeral.

Through car washes and donations from neighbors and friends, they raise $3,000 and give half to Perry to cover much of the $2,754 funeral bill.

The gang's presence is obvious at the funeral. There are scores of flowers, paid for with their remaining share of the money, and they all wear black T-shirts with Martine's gang monicker -- “Lil Stalker” -- along with the date of his death printed on them.

Martine wears a suit and a black cap with the same inscription.

By the time people stop filing by Martine's casket, he is blanketed with pictures of religious figures. A bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila is cradled in his right arm, placed there by his gang friends.

As the casket is lowered into the ground -- right next to his mother -- there are tears in the eyes of many of his homeboys, and some of them are hugging their families. One pays tribute by pouring Budweiser, Martine's favorite, into the grave.

“Unbelievable,” says Oscar, who says he is not officially a Longo, but hangs out with them. He lives next door to where the shooting occurred.

Unbelievable. That's a word Martine's friends use again and again, as if they had never considered the concept of one of them someday ending up alone and dead on a grimy sidewalk.

“I hope it doesn't happen again,” Oscar, 17, continues. “It's the first fatality at 15th and Gaviota (where their clique of the gang hangs out).”

But it's not the first shooting there.

He points to his next-door neighbor, 17-year-old Junior, who was shot once in the head and three times in the back. A huge scar is visible through Junior's buzz cut.

The two talk about how they'd like to get away from the violence.

“I saw how my mom was suffering when I got shot,” Junior says. “I don't want her to have to go through that pain. But it's hard to get away. They're there. You're there. But if you make it to your older years, you realize it's a mistake.”

It's kill or be killed

Three weeks later, the bullet's journey still has not come to an end.

Six of Martine's homeboys gather at 15th and Gaviota.

“That bullet could have hit me or anybody else,” says a 16-yearold who was with Martine when he was shot. “It was unbelievable.”

Does he feel any guilt for nurturing the violence that caused Martine's death?

“Probably,” he says softly.

The others are more defensive.

“He got shot in the back and cheek,” says one, pointing to another. “Look at his car there. It still has a bullet hole.”

“And he got shot in the head,” another says, pointing to Junior.

“It's kill or be killed,” one declares.

The ones who will pay for whatever choices these 15-, 16-, 17year-olds make will be another group of friends, family, police, firefighters, paramedics, doctors, nurses, and counselors.

And, of course, taxpayers.