It was late July 2003 inside a small, dimly lit room at the Jefferson Moss-Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in downtown Philadelphia. And Kevin Johnson, 19, was telling me, an intern at the Daily News barely older than he was, about his nightly dream. In it, he’s on a basketball court, dribbling, passing and cutting through the lane. Then he flies through the air like he has jet packs strapped to his legs.
“It’s like I’m really playing, because I can feel everything,” he said with a toothy smile and a wheezy laugh. “I’m still paralyzed, but it doesn’t stop me.” Then, as tears tumbled down his mother’s cheeks, he said, “I’m going to try to live a regular life.”
As tears tumbled down his mother’s cheeks, he said, ‘I’m going to try to live a regular life.’
A little more than a month earlier, a group of teens tried to rob Kevin for his $150 Allen Iverson basketball jersey. He and a cousin were waiting at a trolley stop in Southwest Philly when they told him to “give it up.” When he refused, one of them pressed a gun to the back of Kevin’s neck, just inches below his skull, and pulled the trigger.
That one bullet changed everything. It knocked Kevin off his feet and into paralysis.
Something inside of me was left frozen, too. From his bedside to the writing of these words, my life and journalism career have been tethered to his spirit and the shock of all that he’d lost.
Kevin’s infectious buoyance and his courageous fight to stay alive stuck with me in deep, meaningful ways. But what I haven’t been able to escape is the incalculability of the cost that he and his family would pay for the bullet lodged in his spine. He paid with his freedom, his mobility and any future he and his family had ever hoped for. And for what? The robbers that shot him never even got the jersey they wanted so badly. The bloody rag had to be cut off Kevin’s back by paramedics.
But what they took was priceless. They robbed his mother of a loving son who was just finding his footing in the world, his siblings of an adoring brother who’d chase them up and down the block, and the world of whoever Kevin would’ve grown to become, unbound by a wheelchair.
But there were other costs, too. From the moment that bullet dug into Kevin’s body, the tally began to tick. His medical bills mounted quickly. Before the rehab facility would discharge him, the family’s bi-level row house would need to be renovated: a special outlet for his breathing machine needed to be installed, a wheelchair ramp would need to be erected, door frames needed widening, and the bathrooms needed to be overhauled. All of that or they’d have to move out. Or the unthinkable: sending Kevin to a nursing home.
He would require 24-hour care to keep him alive and a specially equipped van to transport him and his hulking new wheelchair. That was just to get him home.
Within months of the shooting, his family’s meager savings were exhausted.
The cascade of costs and consequences sparked by a bullet, purchased for as little as $0.25 a round, started an avalanche of millions.
The shooting threw off the family’s orbit in so many intangible ways. But the financial blow was a secondary injury that none of them had anticipated. In the coming years, the costs related to Kevin’s medical condition would be staggering, in the millions. There were the big-ticket items like the several-thousand-dollar wheelchair ramp and his wheelchair, which cost $35,000. Some of his medications were a few hundred dollars a month. There were adult diapers and supplies needed to keep his tracheostomy and breathing tubes clean.
The family scraped together what they could to pay some of these bills out of pocket. Kindhearted strangers helped a lot. But the bulk of the financial costs to keep Kevin alive were paid by taxpayers through public insurance. His mother, Janice, quit her job and took on the full-time job as Kevin’s caregiver.
Just one bullet. The cascade of costs and consequences sparked by a bullet, purchased for as little as $0.25 a round, started an avalanche of millions. Not just for families like Kevin’s but for all of American society.
Economists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, who years ago did some of the most foundational work on the economic impact of gun violence, place the societal cost of a single gunshot injury at more than $1 million. Every gun death costs us more than $5 million. Consider the approximately 100,000 people who are shot in the U.S. in any given year and the price tag becomes staggering. The vast majority of gunshot victims will survive, but many, like Kevin, will suffer catastrophic injury requiring costly medical care and rehabilitation for the rest of their lives. Thanks to medical advancements, these victims are living longer lives, multiplying those costs.
Ted Miller, an economist with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, says that when accounting for much broader direct and indirect societal costs, gun violence costs an astonishing $557 billion a year. Some conservative estimates put these costs at 2.6% of the U.S. GDP.
American taxpayers from the burbs to the battle zones shoulder millions every single day to satisfy the myriad costs of bullets hitting flesh. Taxpayers, survivors, their families and employers pay an average of $7.79 million in health care costs every day and another $30.16 million every day in police and criminal justice costs, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.
American taxpayers from the burbs to the battle zones shoulder millions every single day to satisfy the myriad costs of bullets hitting flesh.
The same group has found that employers lose about $1.47 million a day in productivity, revenue and costs to replace gun violence victims, and society writ large loses $1.34 billion daily in quality-of-life costs related to gunshots.
While these figures are mammoth, they obviously don’t consider the many hard-to-account-for costs: lives lost or ruined, homes wrecked, communities divided, emotional trauma.
Of all the questions that I had standing there in Kevin’s hospital room, listening to his mother running through the seemingly insurmountable costs of keeping Kevin alive, there is one that has begged itself from that moment to this one: How much are we willing to pay?
I’ve spent much of my career asking that same question of police, politicians, victims and perpetrators of violent crime. I’ve asked it in cities across the country. I rephrased it and reconsidered it as I grew from a cub reporter to a seasoned veteran. The question took on greater significance in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, when the philosophical and rhetorical value of Black life was being debated in the streets and in the media in the wake of the shootings of unarmed Black men and women by police. In wrestling with these ideas, I think about Kevin’s plight and the plight of so many other young Black people in poor and working-class communities, those who suffer a disproportionate number of daily shootings.
In 1993, Ralph Green, a 16-year-old gunshot victim from Brooklyn, was called before a congressional panel on gun violence. Before the shooting, he was a promising athlete whose prowess earned him starting spots on the varsity football and basketball teams as a freshman in high school. Then one day, his life came crashing down — with a bullet. In the year between the shooting and being asked to testify in Washington, he underwent 14 surgeries, including the amputation of his left leg. His hospital costs at that point had already climbed higher than $1 million.
“How many million-dollar bullets will it take before someone wakes up?” the teen asked the panel. “Aren’t these gunshots loud enough?”
The story I wrote about Kevin was one of my first front-page stories. The Philadelphia Daily News published a full front-page photo of his smiling face. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so moved by a smile as I was that day.
At the end of 2006, a malfunction with Kevin’s breathing machine left him brain-dead. It was a little more than a week before Thanksgiving, and his family made the hard decision to take him off of life support. The NBA star Allen Iverson, whose jersey Kevin was wearing when he was shot, covered the costs of his funeral.
Yet Kevin’s family continues to pay an unpayable debt.
“If I could put a cost on my feelings, my emotions, it would be in the millions,” Janice tells me, more than 15 years after Kevin was shot. “Because I lost so much when Kevin passed away, and it feels like I’m losing more every single day.”
This is an adapted excerpt of Trymaine Lee’s book, “A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America,” which goes on sale Tuesday, Sept. 9.
