Pray for Darryl

Yesterday, I received a New Orleans newspaper update in my e-mail, and thought that the address reporting the shooting sounded too familiar.  It sounded like a place that I had dropped off one of the kids at the last time I was in New Orleans.  I waited for my phone to ring for a while, but it didn't, and gradually throughout the day, I forgot about it.

Around 6:45 last night I checked my voicemail messages on my phone, and sure enough, it was the address I knew.  Jennifer called to let me know it was Darryl who we call Buddy that had been shot.  He is alive, but fighting for his life.  He was shot six times in the upper torso.  He may lose use of one of his arms.  There is a bullet still floating in him that is close to one of the major arteries.  This morning he is in surgery to try to repair the arm or remove the floating bullet or both.

You can make a case for most of the kids in NO that their lifestyle choices lead to something like this.  In fact, one of the most overused statements when someone is shot is that "he didn't do nothing to nobody."  In fact, there are probably very few people that this statement can be said about.  Unfortunately, Buddy is one of them.  He really has done nothing to no one.  He is not caught up in the drug culture.  He is not a fighter.  He does not get caught up in the turf wars.  He has never been in trouble.  He has a job, and has had it for a while.  He goes to work, stays out of trouble.  He can honestly say that he has done nothing to nobody, yet he still got shot.

The reports of what happened are sketchy at this point, but it looks like that Buddy was just sitting out on the front porch with some other people when a guy came up and started shooting.  It was probably an attempted robbery.  Buddy ran to the post office that is probably a block, block and a half away.  There may have been two or three other kids that I know there.   There is no word on who did the shooting.