Wow, I just read that article, Dave ... How unlucky do you have to be to not even manage to kill yourself WITH A GUN ... Now he's gotta walk around with a bullet path through his face.
A work-study student assigned to my department shot himself in the head around 1994. He was introduced to me as Herman, but the second time I saw him, I misremembered his name and called him Howard. That became our little joke, I called him Howard whenever I saw him.
He was a terrific, almost bubbly kind of guy, a little older than your typical community college kid, right at 30. He had served 6-8 years in the military, and then decided he didn't want that as his career, so he was coming back to school. We later learned that he was on a couple of anti-depressants, and he got into mood-swing trouble at home occasionally when he started drinking. On two different nights, he found a gun.
No one suspected a thing. The first shooting did not kill him, and in fact, the only long-term effects were that he lost some movement on his right side, like a stroke victim, and had to walk with a cane, and that his speech became slightly slurred.
I went with a group of my teaching ladies to visit him in the hospital three or four days after his suicide attempt. His face looked mostly normal, despite the fact that it was swollen; he was restrained in the bed. They could not move him to the psych unit until they stabilized him physically.
His mother had asked us to come because she thought it might do him some good to see some friendly faces. It was not a surprise that we were coming, he had OK'd it after his mother suggested it to him.
When we walked in, his face kit up like a Christmas tree. He immediately launched into a round of jokes, saying something about being Superman, challenging us to survive a gunshot to the head, asking if he could make us copies. We stayed about 10 minutes. He never stopped chattering, mostly trying to make us laugh, stopping for long enough to very vaguely talk about what happened. But the whole time we were there, he never stopped smiling, just like at work.
Over the next couple of years, he got pretty mobile with his cane. He finished up the two year portion of his program with us and moved on to the University, where he was struggling with the material, but well-liked by his professors, and more or less on track to become a civil engineer.
Within a couple of years he was gone. There was a spilled bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor where they found him. The police weren't all that interested in finding out where the gun came from, but down here, firearms are as easy to find as buttermilk.
God bless "Howard" and his poor sweet Mom.
