The Story
While on the way to go see Avengers: End Game on May 7th, 2019 at around 7pm, my brother and I walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts in Western Massachusetts. About 25 minutes later, I was being pulled out of a pool of my own blood and loaded into an ambulance after being stabbed to near death. What was meant to be an evening out with my brother quickly turned tragic.
For those of you who haven’t heard the full story—this is it.
For those of you who have, I hope you don’t mind listening one more time.
Warning - Graphic Imagery Below
I successfully talked my older brother into taking the evening off from volunteering with the local high school youth group that evening—I had free tickets to the movies, and we both had free coupons for a drink at Dunkin’ (double free!).
When we arrived at the Dunkin’ closest to the movie theater, we were walking into a domestic dispute that had actually been going on for some time at the store, unbeknownst to us. Without the entire context, we saw signs of trouble, but not enough in the moment to leave, especially in such a quick in-and-out for us. We first noticed a loud, extended blaring of a car horn by a man in the parking lot as we pulled in. The dispute continued as we were inside, the man coming in and out of the store, throwing the doors open, yelling across the room at a woman who was by the counters, “I finish what I start, I finish what I start!”. The tension built, as a large object was thrown against the outside window of the store by the man.
Anyone who’s grown up in the inner-city, anyone who’s had a long public transit ride home, anyone who’s walked certain streets alone at night would understand—you keep your head down, but also on a swivel. You go about your business, but also understand your environment. Any situation can turn dangerous—we can’t ignore it, but it shouldn’t stop us from going about our day. We were there to order a drink and leave—we had a showtime to make. The aggressive honking had put me on alert walking in. But the yelling and loud “BANG!” as something hit the window during ordering made things tense, and I propped myself up on the counter, facing the entire room, to keep an eye on the ongoing commotion behind us. I wouldn’t keep my back to it.
The man left in a rage, and the woman eventually stepped out too, only to return inside moments later. Unsolicited, she carried herself over to our table and started to talk to us, putting an elbow in my face, slurring “he’s a bitch!” She was intoxicated and eating her bagel more with her face than her mouth. She pulled out a chair from the table I was sitting at, and sat down on the other side. I turned away from her, not entirely, careful not to set her off any more than she already was, but enough to convey that I wasn’t interested in talking. Brief “okays” and “ahas” were offered as platitudes to a conversation I wasn’t going to be a part of. I had already ordered my coffee and I could see it being made—I was leaving in a moment…
And that’s exactly what happened. My coffee was made and ready to be picked up at the end of the counter. I walked that way, grabbed it, and headed towards the door to head to the movie theater.
When right then, coming back inside was the man, charging through the first set of doors and yelling. It was an intimidating scene given the context—the man stood over 6 ft tall and was built athletically, likely weighing over 200 pounds, sporting neck tattoos, clearly angry about something. I backed away from my set of doors to let him blow by, my thought being, “he’s going to beat his girl in this store.”
He stepped briskly past me. But instead of taking a left towards the woman, where we were all seated a moment ago, he went to the right, past me and towards my brother who had followed me from the pick-up counter. Without any notice or reason, the man threw a wild haymaker at my brother and hit him in the head.
In an instant, I pounced on him, the tension boiling over. I hurled one then two then three punches to his face after he had sucker punched my brother. His lip busted and his knees buckled, and I took him to the ground, my forearm around his throat, my body weight on top of him. We were “north-south”, with my chest and head on top of his head and back, and our legs sprawled in opposite directions. As he regained some level of consciousness and stability, his wide fists swung up into my stomach, groin, and thighs (as the bruises would later show), but I felt nothing. The adrenaline was present enough for me to feel nothing, but clearing enough for me to think clearly. The Jesus in my heart stopped me from killing him, I would later recount, as I wrestled with the man just enough to subdue him, ordering the staff to call the police, taking punches to my gut, holding him without any further violence.
After what felt like a few minutes of struggling, the man’s partner turned on me, pulling the hood of my sweater back, forcing the neckline against my throat. “Go take care of her” my brother said, as he went to take over restraining the man. I let go, and in an instant, a hot flash, a viper’s strike, a shadow of movement—I looked down at the inside of my right leg, and against my dark blue jeans, a thick, warm sanguine slurry came spilling out. “Oh SHIT! I’ve been stabbed”, I yelled out to the entire store, warning everyone around me that what had simmered to a wrestling match had suddenly become a knife fight. My mind darted between shock and self-preservation as the blood gushed out both through the hole in my pants, and inside, streaming down my leg, making my jeans stick to my skin—a soupy mess that I tried to contain by pressing my hands down on my inner thigh. “Sit down”, my brother told me, as he came to attend to me, as the police walked in through the door and took control of the situation.
I sat down.
What happened next, what my mind went through, would become the singular tension point of my life after this event—my blood was a puddle around me, my body started to slump, the light started to dim—I was going to die, and I knew it. It all happened so quickly, it made no real sense. I thought I was just getting a coffee and walking out the door. A deep sadness settled in, as I thought of my mom, and saying bye to her one last time.
Would these 25 mins be the end to the last 25 years of my life?
I wasn’t ready to die. Though I felt myself fading, I told myself if I stayed sharp, if I stayed present, I could maybe stay alive. I wanted to live. I just couldn’t let go, I couldn’t slip into the beckoning darkness that weighed atop my eyelids. I clung to the moment, trying to answer every question asked, treating the crisis as simply another problem to solve.
The rest moved quickly–-my clothes were cut away, a tourniquet was applied. I was peeled off the floor and loaded into a stretcher. In the ER, a blood transfusion replenished the over 2 liters of blood I had lost. Emergency vascular surgery was performed to stitch my femoral artery shut.
“A small voice in my head that night…”, my Ukrainian vascular surgeon would recount—the first time I saw him, months later, “…told me to stop scrubbing in for my current surgery and attend to the 25 year old stab victim in critical condition coming into the ER. If I hadn’t…” 13 staples kept the 8 inch scar together.
In the coming months, my body would play tricks on me—one leg went cold, the other, burning hot. A pain, suddenly, in the middle of the night, right where the knife hit—right where my femoral artery was. My mind would play tricks on me. Had I survived the attack, only to have a staple or stitch come undone and bleed-out in a bed? What was the noise, in the middle of the night? Who was the man a few months later, who tried to corner me at a Burger King in the rough part of town, triggering my flight or fight yet again? Who was the woman, who struck up a conversation with me at a restaurant in Boston, who said “she was fighting with her boyfriend and that’s why she was here alone,” as pins and needle ran down my entire body, my skin burning hot, my vision blurring, as I looked for my way out, and fast.
I could hardly walk after the incident. Even bending to sit down on the toilet was difficult. My college roommate’s dad, a medical professional who lived nearby, came immediately when I had a worry—I’d strip naked in my room, and he’d peel back the gooey dressings and examine the ugly-looking, deformed line through my leg that was my scar. Memories flooded back in—laying down on the floor of that Dunkin’, coated in my own blood, a writhing wet mess, and seeing the coffee I had ordered on a table 10 ft away from me—all I could do is beg “water. Please, water”. Waves of emotions would come back—
Embarrassing. Weak. Pitiful. Broken. Alone.
