DETROIT — His pager buzzed three times with a message: level one gsw pediatric. Life-threatening trauma. Gunshot wound. Child.
Ray Winans swiped his key card and opened the doors to the busiest emergency room in one of the deadliest U.S. cities.
“Where’s the GSW?” he asked a security guard.
“Back over there.”
Winans sidestepped a cluster of empty wheelchairs and strode down a long corridor.
“Where is he at?” he asked a nurse.
“Room 2.”
Winans, a broad-shouldered 39-year-old who speaks with the confidence of a stage actor, took a long breath, then pulled back the beige curtain. The child, Mario Brown, who had just turned 17, had yet to arrive from a CT scan of his abdomen and the .22-caliber bullet lodged in it.
Slumped in chairs against one wall were his sister, whose clasped hands rested on her lap, and his cousin, who had Mario’s blood on his pants. Both had tears in their eyes.
“I’m not the police,” Winans told them. “I’m here to help you all. I’m here for you.”
They stared at the empty bed and said nothing.
As a counselor trying to steer boys and young men away from violence in his native Detroit — which has the third-highest homicide rate in the country behind St. Louis and Baltimore — Winans knows the difficulty of getting them to take his message seriously. Danger resides in the abstract until it becomes real. And in the moments and days after somebody takes a bullet and survives, it is very real.
He views each case as an opportunity that might never come again.
Winans would wait for Mario.