By G.W. Schulz
The Chronicle on Sunday launched its lengthy four-part series on the San Francisco General Hospital with the threaded narrative of a 14-year-old boy who was shot in his mid-section by an assault rifle last spring and appeared at the trauma center with seemingly little hope of remaining alive.
In 2001, the boy’s father had been killed by gunfire just a short distance away in the Hunters Point housing project where they lived. After a brief stint in juvenile hall for general teen trouble following his dad’s killing, the Chron’s Mike Weiss reported, the boy’s behavior had begun to improve before he, too, was gunned down for reportedly tossing a water balloon at a friend that accidentally splashed the wrong person.
Weiss then recounts in stunning detail what it took for SF General to put the boy’s guts back together – he barely managed to survive after several surgeries.
The Chron quotes a surgeon:
“‘Problem with AK-47s is they explode in the abdomen. Basically, a bomb went off in his tummy.'”
The photo leading the Chron’s story that day depicted the boy splayed out on a gurney, naked, with an oxygen mask attached to his face. The intent of the Chron’s pieces was to focus on life inside the nationally recognized hospital and the resources it takes to sustain the city’s only trauma center. The names of both the boy and his father are not revealed by the paper.