If only I had been there a few minutes before …

Submitted by Anonymous

November 9, 2021: It was unusual for me to be home at 2 pm. I was there to let the bathroom workers in my house. As I was parking my car, I saw a boy lying on the sidewalk outside my house, face down. Someone came up to my car and said that the boy had been shot. I hurriedly parked my car. There were a few people staring at him. As I quickly approached him, a voice from the back said, “Don’t touch him. It is a police case.” The doctor's instinct in me did not listen to those voices. I turned him around on his back. He looked like a teenage Asian kid. He had been shot in the chest. I could not feel a carotid pulse. I could not feel his breath. I started CPR immediately but wasn’t able to resuscitate him.

A few days later, his mom, who only spoke Mandarin, came to thank me for being with her son during his last few moments. She was a single mother and he was her only son. She showed me a photograph of the last gift he had given to her. The gift was wrapped and had a red rose on top with words in Mandarin that translated to “Forever, I will hold your hand.” He had just completed his masters in statistics from a very prestigious university in the United States. He had published a book in Finance. He was a ping pong champion and played the piano. Few candid pictures of him showed him working on his laptop in the train, while waiting for the train, and late hours in the night. He loved to work and wanted to get his mother a better life.

While she was thanking me, I kept thinking to myself … “If only I had been there a few minutes before, just maybe he wouldn’t have been shot.”