Ronnie Polaneczky | A harshly different life

ON AUG. 12, 2006, Chinika Perez was lucky enough to survive a gunshot wound so life-threatening, she had no pulse or blood pressure when police rushed her to Temple University Hospital.

A year later, this is what her lucky life looks like:

She spends her days in a wheelchair, because her left leg is gone at the hip and her right one is missing below the knee.

She can barely feed herself, fix her hair or use the bathroom alone, because her hands are bent and useless.

At least she can still hug her kids - Bianca, 5, and Matthew, 2. But she must rely on her mom, Gloria Cruz, with whom she now lives in Olney, to help care for them.

As for employment, she dearly misses her former co-workers at D's Crab Claw, where she had worked full-time at a job that allowed her to live happily and independently. So money is suddenly an issue, especially since her mom quit her own housecleaning business to help care for Chinika and the kids.

They're on a red-tape-laden waiting list for a ramp for the front steps, which they need for Chinika to be able to leave the house more easily. And they can't afford a new car to replace the one that was stolen Tuesday, which her mom had used to transport Chinika to therapy.

Nonetheless, Chinika radiates a joy that's almost unfathomable, given all she has lost. She laughs easily and often, smothers her kids in kisses when they clamber onto her wheelchair, is mostly unabashed about her obvious disfigurement.

"I still can't believe that this is my life," says Chinika, 27, with more bafflement than self-pity as her children scamper around her mom's living room, hovered over by attentive aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.

"How can you be fine and walking around one day, and then lose your legs? How can one bullet do that?"

By now, we all know that Philadelphia had 406 homicides in 2006. A less-known number from last year is 2,004. That's how many victims suffered nonfatal gunshot wounds.

We can comfort ourselves by saying that many of the city's gunshot victims, like many of its homicide victims, contributed to their own sorry fate. You know - they're bad people whose bad actions placed them in bad situations with other bad people, where something bad befell them, the way it often does to bad people.

Except Chinika doesn't fit into that category. She was just a nice, hardworking single mom who innocently went out one night to socialize - and her world flipped upside down.

Her story is wrenching not just because of what happened to her, but because different versions of it played out more than 2,000 times in the city last year.

It's what happens every time a bullet hits flesh.

On that August night, Chinika drove her cousin to a bar on Cambria Street to meet a friend. She planned to return right home, but bumped into Enrique Irizarry, 28, whom she'd recently met through an acquaintance.

"We'd had a few dates, but nothing serious," says Chinika. "He seemed like a nice person."

What she didn't know was that Irizarry had done lots of time for drugs and other charges. As a felon, he was forbidden to possess a weapon - not that it stopped him from carrying a loaded .357 Magnum that night.

The last thing Chinika remembers is joining him inside the bar for a drink. It wasn't until she awoke in Temple's ICU more than a month later that she learned what happened afterward.

Chinika was outside the bar with Irizarry, arguing about something. Irizarry pointed his gun at her head. She pushed it away just before a bullet tore through her thigh, including her right femoral artery and vein. By the time police arrived, minutes later, Irizarry had fled and Chinika had bled out right there on Cambria Street.

"Technically, she was dead when the police brought her here," says Temple trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg, who resuscitated Chinika that night via a thoracotomy - a procedure in which Chinika's chest was cracked open and blood flow restored to her heart while surgeons tended to her wounds.

Over the next weeks, though, complications set in and Chinika's limbs began to die. First to go was her left leg, which had to be amputated at the hip. Then her right leg, below the knee. Doctors were able to save her arms from amputation, but parts of her muscles died and had to be removed. The resulting scar tissue is so thick, it has frozen her long, delicate fingers and bent her hands at right angles to her wrists.

"She'll need surgery to release some of that tissue, which could return some movement to her hands," says Goldberg, who has overseen thousands of salvaged lives at Temple but has been so haunted by the outcome of Chinika's shooting that she requested a private meeting with her not long ago, to ask a question:

Was she sorry that Goldberg her saved her life?

"In a crisis situation [like Chinika's], our medical philosophy is 'life-before-limb,' " says an emotional Goldberg. "The surgeries we did saved her life, but she's such a young woman - she was so independent, her whole life was ahead of her. What we did changed everything. It was very self-serving of me to ask her if it was worth it, but I needed her to let me off the hook."

Chinika recalls their conversation that day with a huge smile.

"I said, 'Of course I'm glad you saved me! I died on a sidewalk, and you brought me back to life. I'm alive to be with my kids. You are my savior.' "

Of the many emotional moments Chinika has had since the shooting, yesterday saw some of the highest and lowest.

In Courtroom 1102 of the Criminal Justice Center, she watched with almost a dozen family members and other supporters as Enrique Irizarry pleaded guilty before Judge Harold Kane to aggravated-assault and weapons charges in Chinika's shooting.

Irizarry's sentence: 12 to 24 years, plus three years for violating his parole.

He stood and faced Chinika, apologized for the devastation he'd caused, said he'd never meant to harm her. He never disrespected her when they were together, he said, because he had loved her.

Chinika sobbed so hard with grief and rage - never disrespected her? Like pointing a loaded gun at her wasn't the height of disrespect? - that the judge called a recess.

Chinika's family surrounded her, wiping her eyes and nose for her.

She was so surrounded by love - there are also nearly 60 aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws in her immediate family, plus dear friends who support her - that, yesterday at least, she did indeed seem lucky.

Within a few moments, she had composed herself, laughing with relief that the case was over, that she could put Irizarry behind her and move forward with her life. There was too much to live for, and Irizarry wasn't worth one more tear.

When the judge returned, Chinika was asked if she had anything she wanted to say to Irizarry before he was led away.

Eyes dry, she pursed her lips and slowly, defiantly, shook her head.

No, she said.

Not one word. *

 
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