Shooting victim wants to help others
By AMY SAUNDERS
HILLIARD, Ohio — Almost five years after his best friend accidentally shot him in the face, the bullet remains lodged in Josh Roose’s brain.
Roose, an eighth-grader at Hilliard Memorial Middle School at the time, initially faced, at best, a 15 percent chance of survival. His injuries would require five brain surgeries.
Even if he beat the odds, doctors feared he would never walk or talk again.
Today, at 20, Roose is partially paralyzed on his left side and can no longer play the guitar or drums — his former passions. And he won’t live on his own, because, with the brain damage he suffered, he can’t recall events only hours old.
But he has a job, mobility with the help of a leg brace and conversation still tinged with humor. He has life.
His recovery is detailed in “Joshua’s Story: Waiting on Another Miracle,” a new book written by his mother, Linda Roose.
“Sometimes things happen; we’ll never understand,” said Linda Roose, 54. “But we do know that we can make it.”
On the evening of May 17, 2005, 14-year-old Joe Murray told his mother what he thought had just happened: “I killed my best friend.”
Minutes after the boys had eaten ice cream together, Roose, a neighbor in the Village at Hilliard Green subdivision, lay bleeding on Murray’s bedroom floor.
The seventh-grader used lawn-mowing money to expand his collection of weapons, some of which carried sentimental value. All but one gun had belonged to his father, who died years earlier.
None was supposed to be loaded, Murray told police.
Roose’s victories were small at first: He used speech-therapy cards to communicate his emotions and wrote “Josh supper” on a scrap of paper.
Rehabilitation slowly helped him to relearn everything: how to sit up, eat pudding, speak words, walk 10 steps at a time.
Intense pain accompanied every movement. With his sense of self returning, though, Roose joked with therapists even when they pushed him to his limits.
“Oh, hello? I got a bullet in my head, remember?” he’d say. “Easy does it.”
Still, his health at times turned precarious.
During a fourth surgery to replace a part of his skull, he said, he had a near-death experience in which he saw God and Jesus, and skipped rocks on a lake with a family friend who had recently died.
“I went to heaven,” he said. “No lie — for real.”
But God, he said, wouldn’t allow him to stay.
Every day, Roose thinks of what he says God told him: “It’s not your time. You have to go back and help people.”
He works at Dublin Methodist Hospital as part of Project Search, a new high-school transition program for Hilliard and Dublin students with physical and developmental disabilities.
When he finishes the rotational program at the end of the school year, Roose will have, among other jobs, assisted pharmacists, served food in the hospital cafeteria and sterilized surgical instruments.
He hopes to work in a related field upon graduating in May from Hilliard Darby High School, where he has taken special-needs and adjusted courses.
The effects of his accident linger: he wears braces on his left arm and leg, which are partially paralyzed. His IQ score of 68 falls into the range of those with mild mental retardation.
And, because of his short-term memory loss, he records his daily activities in a journal, starting with the basics: “Got up. Dressed. Meds. Breakfast.”
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