OH:Criminals, Emergency Rooms, and Survival

When a person suffers severe trauma, minutes become precious.  Prompt medical treatment means the difference between losing a limb or keeping it, between full brain function and life confined to a wheel chair, between life and death. 

I recently wrote about the percentage of people who are shot who survive.   One of the most important factors in survival is whether a person shot arrives at a medical treatment facility with a pulse and blood pressure.  If they do, chances of survival jump to about 95%. 

In this example of a shooting of an intruder in Prairie Township, Ohio,  the budding criminal's "friends" either did not know this, were drug or alcohol addled, or were hoping it would all go away with wishful thinking.   Reality intruded instead.  From columbusdispatch.com:

Despite a gunshot wound in his upper back, Barbee ran with his friends about a half-mile back to Barbee’s house at 635 Dovalon Place.

Nobody called 911. Not until an hour later, at 5:14 a.m. when Adam Pickens picked up the phone

(snip)

Their friend dead, Pickens and two other youths, Brandon J. Hamilton and Tyler R. Blazer, both 17, were arrested. Hamilton and Blazer are facing delinquency counts of murder and complicity to aggravated burglary. Pickens is facing those same charges in adult court and is being held on $250,000 bond.

“If they would have got him help, we wouldn’t be talking about murder charges,” Franklin County Sheriff Zach Scott said. “It was a bad decision on top of a bad decision.”

Members of the new tribes known as gangs know to drop off a shot confederate at the local emergency room.   These young men do not appear to be part of a gang, and they did not have the street smarts to take their friend to the hospital immediately.  Prairie Township is mostly surrounded by Columbus, Ohio.   Perhaps an Ohio resident can give us local knowledge about the area.

 ©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
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