by Robbie Tolan
My dad said a police officer told him he could crawl through a back window if he wanted to get inside. “The guy thought it was like a joke. Meanwhile, I’m seeing them walk back and forth through the front door with no issues.”
As everyone continued to talk around me, my eyes eventually moved from them to the television, where it turned out, unsurprisingly, that I was the lead news story.
“Questions surround the shooting of baseballer’s son.…”
“Bellaire police very tight-lipped over shooting.…”
“Tolan is one of three black men shot by white police officers in the past twenty-four hours of this New Year’s holiday, two of them dying. Inquiries are being made.…”
Wait, what? I thought. Two other black men had been shot? Where? What happened? It turns out that the twenty-four hours between 2008 New Year’s Eve and 2009 New Year’s Day had turned into a particularly busy time for white officers shooting black men.
One guy, Adolph Grimes III, was one of the thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims who’d moved from New Orleans to Houston, and if you go by the history of the Bellaire police, Grimes was the exact type they’d harass if he showed up driving down one of our tree-lined streets. But in this instance, Grimes was back in New Orleans, visiting relatives for the New Year’s holiday, when nine New Orleans cops, in a situation that was eerily similar to my own, gunned him down.
Grimes had driven from Houston to New Orleans, a five-hour trip, and according to his father, he had gotten there right around midnight, “without a second to spare” before the start of the new year. All was good as the Grimes family celebrated New Year’s at his grandmother’s house right outside the French Quarter. However, as the celebratory fireworks exploded over New Orleans, things took a horrible turn around three o’clock in the morning.
As Grimes walked from his grandmother’s house to his car, waiting for his cousin to come out, nine undercover narcotics officers unexpectedly surrounded his car, guns drawn. The New Orleans narcotics team had been out on patrol that evening, in the same way that Bellaire cops were on patrol looking for the crew stealing cars. They’d locked on Grimes, even though he hadn’t been doing anything criminal. What happened next is up for debate.
According to the New Orleans police, Grimes shot at them and then ran. The Grimes family maintains that Grimes was simply running for his life, knowing the reputation of the New Orleans police. Or, they thought that maybe Grimes believed he was going to be robbed since the police were in plainclothes.
To the New Orleans police, Grimes was a dangerous suspect who needed to be stopped. Regardless of which side you take, the undeniable fact is that nine New Orleans cops shot at Grimes forty-eight times, hitting him fourteen times, including twelve shots to the back. And yes, Grimes had a gun, but he had a legal permit to carry the firearm.
Like me, Grimes had no criminal record, had gone to a prestigious high school in his hometown, and was just outside his own family’s house when he was shot. He was twenty-two years old, just a year younger than me, and although I have no children, I feel for him because he had a seventeen-month-old son who will never know his father. There were so many similarities between Grimes and me that it freaked me out.
The third black victim of those twenty-four hours, twenty-three-year-old Oscar Grant, was shot in Oakland. I watched the report about his killing, but the impact only hit me days later when the explosive video of his murder was released. And again, there were similarities to my incident.
The Oscar Grant shooting took place around two o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day. Grant and his friends were taking the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) subway train from San Francisco to Oakland, after celebrating New Year’s with others, when the BART police were called about a possible fight between some riders who were “hammered and stoned” on the train. When the BART train arrived at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland, two BART officers took Grant and his three friends off the train and promptly put them up against the wall, handcuffing one. One of the officers punched one of them, agitating the other passengers on the train, and that’s when things started going sideways.
Just like how Sgt. Cotton arrived on the scene to make a bad situation worse, BART officer Johannes Mehserle arrived at the Fruitvale Station scene late and attempted to handcuff Grant. Grant had been forced to the ground, just like I had been, face down, but when he heard that he was going to be arrested, he tried to raise himself up. Officer Mehserle put a knee in his back, forcing him to stay on the ground.
All of this was being recorded by other passengers with cell phones because they were skeptical of any interaction between black men and cops as a result of the nationwide epidemic of white cops shooting black men. So it had become routine, almost a necessity, to pull out a phone and record the police interactions, just like Anthony had tried to keep my cousin on the line during our own incident.
Meanwhile, as Mehserle pulled on Grant’s right arm and hand, trying to get handcuffs on him, he kept yelling at Grant to comply.
“Don’t taze me,” Grant kept repeating. Suddenly, Mehserle stood up, unholstered his semi-automatic handgun, a SIG Sauer P226, and shot Grant in the back, with the bullet exiting Grant’s chest and ricocheting on the concrete platform.
“You shot me! I got a four-year-old daughter!” Grant shouted, a passenger recalled. Seven hours later, Grant died at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, a hospital so well known for dealing with gunshot wounds that the military sent its own doctors to Highland to see how they treated bullet wounds for their own work treating combat injuries.
Three black men, either my age or close to it, shot in less than twenty-four hours, and here I am, miracle of all miracles, still alive while they are dead. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of my feelings of guilt at having lived. Mentally, nothing can prepare you for the guilt; it just comes at you, and when it comes, it comes hard and strong.
“I knew you were different when you arrived.”
“How?”
“Your shoes. When you came in, I looked down at your shoes and thought ‘Man, those are some expensive shoes.’”
The chief of staff at Ben Taub General Hospital, Dr. Kenneth Mattox, is the unsung hero in my story, just one of many people who used their intuition to realize that I hadn’t done anything to deserve getting shot.
It’s strange to think that we have categories of people who deserve and who don’t deserve to be shot, but we do, mainly because of the consistency of the people who are brought into the trauma unit on their backs, bleeding and holding onto life, and they ain’t a bunch of white hedge fund managers.
Dr. Mattox said that most of his gunshot victims were from the inner city, and you could identify them by their dress: baggy clothes, tattoos, and gaudy jewelry. I didn’t fit that description, so it struck him as odd that I was in his operating room. Not that the young men and women who did wear the uniform of the inner city deserved to be shot by the police, but I stood out as an exception.
According to Dr. Mattox, the Bellaire police had wanted to follow me into the operating room, get the clothes they’d cut off me as evidence, and then interrogate me after my surgery, but he wouldn’t allow it. He ran his hospital the way he wanted, and he wasn’t about to have his patient handcuffed to the bed if he thought the patient hadn’t done anything wrong.
“I didn’t think those guys from Bellaire were up to any good, especially after they tried to barge in my operating room and demand my staff to give them your clothes that we cut off of you.”
Dr. Mattox gave me a code name, Unknown 90, as a way to throw the Bellaire police off my location in the hospital. He put me in a private room and then let my family use a conference room to get away from the police. Hiding a patient was something that hospitals did when they had a celebrity in residence, and it kept the media at bay. This was the first indication that I’d become a celebrity of sorts for taking a police bullet.
“So I have some good news and some bad ne
ws,” Dr. Mattox told me and my parents, as the rest of the family left the room.
“The good news is that you’re going to be just fine,” he started. “You’re a baseball player, right? Well, you’ll be able to do everything you did before you were shot.”
“And the bad news?” I asked, as I tried to lift myself slowly in the bed to a sitting position. Every movement hurt.
“The bad news is that we had to leave the bullet in your liver,” he said.
“What?”
“It was too dangerous to try to take out,” he said. “We think that if we’d tried to take it out, you would have bled out. But here’s the thing: your liver will function just fine. In fact, it will heal around the bullet.”
I had to let that sink in. I now had a bullet inside my body for the rest of my life, for the crime of doing nothing except going home. One minute, I was fine. The next, I had a bullet in my liver for doing nothing. What type of world was I living in? I knew I would have plenty of time to contemplate that question, but first, I had to survive the aftermath.
Life in the hospital wasn’t comfortable at all. Pain was everywhere in my body, at all times. Everything the doctors and nurses did to get me healthy revolved around that pain, and I swear that pain is seared into my soul.
The nurses had inserted an NG tube, a plastic tube that goes through the nose, past the throat, and down into the stomach, used to provide nutrition and administer medicine. The NG tube made talking difficult, but it also made me constantly thirsty, as the tube filled my throat. When the nurses weren’t looking, I’d get sips of water from my relatives. I don’t know if that was a bad thing; okay, yeah, I know that was a bad thing, but it didn’t ultimately kill me, so hey…
Obviously, the bullet left a gaping hole in my chest, and that required my nurses to pack the wound with medicated gauze. The doctors explained that they couldn’t sew up the wound because it would have healed on the surface, but then would have become infected underneath the surface. Unfortunately, that meant that the gauze needed to be changed each day, which was my least favorite routine, as the nurse would first use a cotton swab to pack the gauze deeply into the wound. It was beyond painful. But it wasn’t as painful as when the nurse had to come back later to pull it out with a pair of pliers, which made me feel like my chest was being ripped wide open. The doctors required that the gauze be changed twice a day, every day, and it was something I dreaded deep in the marrow of my bone. But that was just the beginning of my life of pain.
Six inches under my right armpit, a chest tube had been inserted through the ribs and into my liver, draining all of the blood and puss from my liver and causing the small bag hanging on the side of my bed to look like a Halloween prop. It also meant that my arm was constantly in the air because to bring it down meant extreme pain. Try keeping your arm in the air for five minutes. Now do it for ten minutes. Now imagine keeping your arm in the air for days on end. That was my life.
Now, to get to the bullet, the surgeons had to make an incision from the bottom of my sternum to an inch and a half past my belly button; the incision was held together by thirty-eight staples. My breathing was already labored, but with the staples, it felt like each breath was pulling at the incision, so there was constant pain.
Needless to say, I was jacked up on so much anesthesia, morphine, and Vicodin for most of my early stay in the hospital that I was woozy to the point that when I had visitors, I’d engage for a few minutes and then completely crash from exhaustion. Soon the nurses put me on an intrathecal pump, a tube inserted into my spinal column that, with a push of a button, injected me with morphine. The pain was so bad it would wake me up, so I found myself pushing the button ten times, hoping that I’d get a larger dose of morphine, even though the pump prevents patients from getting more than they are allowed.
Because the bullet had caused my lung to collapse, Dr. Mattox ordered me to cough as often as possible as a way to re-inflate the lung. Sometimes, he’d pop in just long enough so that I’d cough, and just his seeing his head in the door caused me to have a Pavlovian response.
But, like everything else in my life, even coughing was complicated. The problem was that while I was in the hospital, I developed a mysterious pain that doctors could never explain or identify but that was, unfortunately, triggered by my coughing. Every time I coughed, it felt like I was being tasered, hard, and it lasted for months after I left the hospital. So here I was. On the one hand, I wanted to breathe, but on the other hand, breathing came with a painful price.
Great.
Oh, and let’s not forget the sticking of the needles. The nurses were always taking my vitals, making my veins raw and weak, so it would sometimes take up to thirty minutes to find a good one. One time, I was poked eight times before the nurse decided to turn over the job to an IV technician. It got to the point that any time the nurse entered my room to draw blood, I’d convulse in tears. I was a grown man who’d become fearful of a needle, like I was a three-year-old child going to the doctor.
My previously athletic and muscular body swelled up like a fat balloon, partly because moving was so difficult. Walking from the bed to the bathroom was a huge challenge, so a week after I’d been shot I gained over 30 pounds, going from 205 pounds to 240 pounds. That, no matter how you measure it, was not good. To keep my body from swelling, the nurses wrapped two cuffs around my ankles that were designed to compress every thirty minutes, which also helped prevent blood clots. The bed inflated and deflated to keep the blood circulating throughout my body as much as possible.
All of the constant excruciating pain started to affect me mentally. I began having panic attacks. I was trapped in a body that I didn’t understand and didn’t recognize, and my brain couldn’t comprehend how to deal with it. It was as though it didn’t know whether the pain would ever go away, and I’d be trapped like this forever.
One night, I woke up in a panic from a nightmare, and the only thing I could see were all of these wires, tubes, monitors, and machines beeping and pulsating, and I freaked out. I ripped the NG tube out of my nose, and for just a minute, I felt relief. I finally felt like I was in control of my body and my life.
However that control was an illusion, and reality came back to me quickly. The reality was the painful process of putting the NG tube back into my nose; one nurse held my head back and another shoved the plastic tube through my nostrils, like I was a torture victim.
Even when I received good news, like when one of the tubes was removed because I’d improved, the pain was never far away. But believe me when I say that nothing compared to the pain that was to come when my chest tube was removed. And it came all of a sudden.
I was minding my business and talking with my family when two doctors burst into my room like they were part of a SWAT team.
“Everyone needs to leave. Now!”
Whoa. My eyes started darting around as I tried to figure out what the hell was happening. You could tell that the doctors were not playing around, not at all, and I guess that the shock-and-awe approach was designed to create a sense of authority so that no one even thought to question them. It was effective because everyone left the room like their pants were on fire.
“What’s going on?” I asked frantically. No one said anything, but they both raised my arm above my head.
“Close your eyes and take a deep breath and hold it. When you do it, close your lips.”
Sorry, but the only thing going through my head was one phrase: What the fuck?
At this point, I was beyond panicky. What the hell was going on? But I did as I was told because doctors sorta have that effect on you.
As soon as I closed my lips, that was the signal for them to pull out my tube, and they did. It probably only took a second, but it felt like an eternity. The pain was intense, and the sound of the tube being removed sounded like a person shoving a hand into a bowl of wet noodles.
Not good.
Being in the hospital made me feel like I was living in a cage. I�
�m naturally a physical guy. I’m used to moving and moving with a purpose, and here I was tied to a damn hospital bed. My hospital stay lasted three weeks because I needed a lot of physical therapy, which didn’t go that well in the beginning. I literally needed about thirty minutes to walk four steps. My body was in such bad shape, with swollen areas everywhere, that simply opening my eyes to start a new day was discouraging. I started to lose hope, and when you start losing hope, it’s hard to mark progress.
Once the swelling went down, I was able to get around a little bit better. I walked with a walker sometimes three or four times a day, with two people on each side of me and one in back of me, just in case I fell back. I had to walk because the doctors said that if I didn’t, they might have to do another surgery due to fluid building up in my liver, and I didn’t want another surgery. Thankfully, the walking worked to reduce the fluid.
I’m not telling you all of this to gross you out or gain your sympathy. That’s not my intention. I want people to understand that a single bullet does profound damage to the body, and although the scars may heal, the trauma never really does. You live with the pain, the memory of the pain, and the mental baggage that comes with it forever. That’s the constant drumbeat in my life as I deal with the pain, and it’s not fair. And we need to do something about it.
Why? Because the facts of my case are simple, at least in my eyes, when it comes to how unjust my shooting was. I was driving my own car. I was parked in front of my own house. I was not armed. I was not drunk or high. I didn’t have a record. And I was shot because of the incompetence of two police officers who didn’t have the foresight to double check a license plate. I don’t know how you can spin that in favor of the police.
In essence, I was shot for no reason, but that didn’t stop the Bellaire authorities from trying to convince the media and the public that race had nothing to do with Anthony and I being stopped in the first place. It defied logic.
