#COMPTON SHOOTING MARCH 2019 HOW TO#
#COMPTON SHOOTING MARCH 2019 FULL#

“Nobody should ever be shot,” Inaba said, “and yet we’re seeing hundreds and hundreds of these patients getting shot.”Īround those victims - and perpetrators - are thousands of others whose lives are shaken. He wonders whether, if others saw what he saw, they would take the proliferation of guns in L.A. Inaba pairs that knowledge with what he sees when he works several times a month as a reserve LAPD officer, when he responds to patrol calls and sees firsthand the sort of human dramas and anger that precipitate the gunfire, he said.

#COMPTON SHOOTING MARCH 2019 HOW TO#

With gunshot wounds, surgical teams have to “figure out what’s wrong, what the gunshot wound has destroyed and how to piece it back together” at lightning speed, Inaba said. It’s difficult and fulfilling work, he said - but also extremely trying, particularly as COVID-19 has already left hospital workers “exhausted mentally and physically.” “On any given day, we could be operating on a gunshot wound and literally the pagers - they’re phones now - they go off and another gunshot or two or three gunshot wounds can come in.” “The numbers are definitely increasing,” he said.

#COMPTON SHOOTING MARCH 2019 FULL#

This year, the hospital had already treated 381 gunshot victims by the end of August and surpassed 2020’s year-end total by September, said Inaba, who didn’t have full 2021 data yet. County - treated 398 gunshot victims last year, an increase of more than 30% over the 296 it treated in 2019. Kenji Inaba, chief of trauma and surgical critical care at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, said County-USC - one of more than a dozen trauma centers in L.A. “I feel like I’m living a nightmare, like one day I’m going to wake up and hopefully it’s just over,” she said. Some need help paying for funerals.īasquez said she is grateful her son survived but saddened by his injuries, devastated for the other mothers she knows in San Pedro whose sons are gone forever, and frustrated with the lack of attention such shootings receive in the city - especially when they involve Black and Latino kids, and aren’t in wealthier parts of town. Some need help covering medical expenses or the lost wages of injured loved ones. Like Reynolds’ mother and many other families of shooting victims in L.A., Basquez started a GoFundMe page to ask friends and strangers to help cover the unthinkable costs of such violence. She is trying to figure out a way to raise enough money to purchase the medical equipment he will need to move home - including a special motorized bed that sells, used, for thousands of dollars. She anguished in a parking lot until a surgeon finally came out to tell her Vincent was alive but badly injured.Įver since, Basquez has traveled back and forth from her home to the hospital and a convalescent facility where her son, who she said did not want to comment, is now staying. When Basquez rushed to the hospital on the summer night of her son’s shooting, COVID-19 protocols prevented her from going inside, where she thought Vincent was dying or already dead. Police have linked it to a cluster of others that prosecutors allege were all the work of one person, a young man with alleged gang ties whose nickname is listed in court records as “Reaper.” In July, her 24-year-old son Vincent, who played four years of varsity football at San Pedro High School, was paralyzed in a shooting that has baffled his family. Tina Basquez has spent the last 13 years in the same San Pedro home but is going into 2022 looking for a new place to live, she said. Doctors and nurses already exhausted by COVID-19’s onslaught have seen new horrors in the faces of children wheeled into their hospital wards with gunshot wounds. Street corners have turned aglow for the dead in impromptu candlelight vigils in sight of the remnants of memorials past. have socially distanced as much out of grief as pandemic propriety, their devastation compounding the year’s isolation.

The effects of the violence, however, are clear and inarguable - rippling out from individual incidents in almost every corner of the city to impact not only the victims and perpetrators, but their extended families, neighbors and local businesses, emergency room staffs and the policymakers and police whose job it is to find solutions. Other parts of the nation have also seen surges in killing, some worse than L.A.’s. The causes are complex and hard to pin down, and have been politicized - exaggerated or minimized - to meet people’s chosen narratives about police, criminal justice and the best path forward.

Compton shooting march 2019