Gunshot Victim Loses More Than His Game

March 30, 2005

The Boston Herald

The shooting of Lawrence High School's hoop star, 18-year-old Hector Paniagua, is being reported as if the tragedy of this mayhem is that Paniagua, who had college scouts looking at him, may never play basketball again.

If only that were the worst of it.

In the wrong place at the wrong time, Paniagua - by all accounts a good kid, good student, well liked and well respected - was gunned down early Easter morning outside a hip-hop dance, police believe, by a bullet that was intended for someone else. An unknown gunman fired at least seven shots. One of the bullets entered Paniagua's neck, grazed a lung, then hit his spinal cord. Following surgery, Paniagua, according to his mother, was alert and speaking, but unable to feel his legs.

You have a child and you do all you can to protect him. And then someone does this.

Days are long in a hospital bed. But your family's there and your friends visit and even immobility is OK for a while. But forever?

There's a man in a hospital room across the hall from a friend I visit. He was shot in the neck on a Brockton street 11 years ago. He was a boy then, just 19. He's 30 now and still unable to feel anything from the neck down.

It isn't just basketball that Paniagua may lose. It's the life he knew, every ordinary thing that was part of the young, healthy life he had.

Why do kids do this to one another? It's the Wild West in our cities, children getting killed all the time. A 10th-grader was shot dead in broad daylight on a bus in Dorchester two weeks ago. His grandmother said she had now lost four of her grandchildren to violence. Chauntae Jones, who was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed and buried alive in Mattapan in 1999, was her grandchild, too.

Wouldn't you think kids would ask, “What are we doing to one another? We're on the same team.’'

Enough bad stuff happens - random stuff, stuff you can't control. A mother takes her year-old son for a checkup and the doctor says he's not well and the boy dies before he's 3. A teen steps into the path of a car she didn't see. Disease, disaster - they're everywhere.

Why then, with tragedy waiting around the corner, do people add to life's misfortunes by hurting one another?

There's “no respect for human life,'' Mayor Tom Menino said after the MBTA shooting. No respect, no boundaries and no real understanding of consequences.

Firearms kill eight children or teens every day in this country, the Children's Defense Fund says. Every two weeks one of them is from Massachusetts.

Hector Paniagua isn't even part of these statistics. He's a survivor. He's one of the lucky ones.

But how ``lucky'' is he really? He may be alive, but the life he knew - pain-free, healthy and decades away from hospitals and therapists - ended last week.