ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 16, 1995 TAG: 9512180040
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on December 17, 1995.
Saturday's New River Current incorrectly reported the bank where the
account for shooting victim Jason Wood, 14, has been established. The
account is set up at First National Bank in Blacksburg.
When Jason Wood felt the sting of a BB pellet against his forehead last Sunday, he thought he could stop the bleeding himself.
Instead, he's spent almost a week in the hospital, with the pellet still lodged in his brain.
Doctors say it's best to leave the pellet where it is.
Wood, 14, and a freshman at Blacksburg High School, was visiting a 15-year-old friend's home Sunday when he was shot.
"It was just a bunch of kids around the trailer," said Deborah Cumbee, Jason's mother. "Jason told him 'don't aim it at anybody' [and] 'you're going to hurt somebody.'"
Wood remembers what happened next.
"I turned around and when I turned back around, I felt this big thud."
Blood ran down his eye and nose.
"That's when I knew I'd been shot," Wood said from his Roanoke Memorial Hospital bed Thursday afternoon.
Wood, thinking he could hide the wound from his mother, got a towel and tried to stop the bleeding. He thought the pellet had simply went in and out, barely piercing his skin.
But the wound was more serious.
One of his friends went to get Wood's mother.
"We just rushed him to the hospital," Cumbee recalled. "It never entered my mind to call the police. ... I just wanted to get him to the emergency room.
"It just scared me. I just wanted to get him to the hospital."
Wood was treated at Montgomery Regional Hospital, and transferred to Roanoke Memorial Hospital later Sunday.
His family notified Blacksburg police Monday, and they are investigating the shooting.
Cumbee said she's spoken briefly with the mother of the boy. His name is not being released because of his age.
"The doctors say he couldn't have been more than five feet away from me," Wood said, but he recalls the distance as being five to 10 feet.
Meanwhile, the pellet stays put.
"They can't take it out," Cumbee said. "When they shot him it went above his right eyebrow into his sinus cavity." Then it traveled into the right side of his brain and lodged between the left and right hemispheres.
"It's right next to his sight," she said, and the doctor doesn't want to risk affecting his vision by trying to remove the bullet.
"If this was a real gun," Cumbee said, "there would be no Jason."
Wood is receiving antibiotics to help ward off possible infection.
The injury has affected his short term memory and his vision is still a little blurry, but all in all, Cumbee says, "it's just amazing that he recovered as fast as he did."
Outwardly, the wound - a small, pimple-like scab - is barely visible above his right eyebrow.
Only the fact that Wood is lying in a hospital bed, occasionally wincing in pain gives away that the wound is more serious. .
It's a lot to ask a young teen-ager to be confined to a hospital bed for a week.
He's been sleeping a lot - or at least trying to.
"I miss home a lot. Here you can't get any sleep," he said, complaining of nurses waking him throughout the night to check on him.
"A couple of my friends have called and two of them came to see me."
If Wood is transferred back to Montgomery Regional Hospital, those visits from friends will increase, and help pass the time until he's released, perhaps on Monday.
He confesses to missing school "a little bit."
Cumbee thinks her son's shooting also should serve as a warning to parents considering buying their child a BB gun or other weapon, perhaps for Christmas.
Children need to be supervised while handling these guns, she said. "They can do a lot of damage."
Wood agreed, noting people were wrong in "thinking that BB guns can't break the skin."
Cumbee didn't want to leave her son alone in the hospital, so she spent much of the first few days there, round the clock.
Even without the cost of hospitalization - his father has insurance but they're not sure how much it will cover - it's been expensive to stay at the hospital.
"It's already a big burden. We've depleted every bit of our money," Cumbee said.
Sleeping in lounges and eating all meals out, even buying coffee, has added up.
Christmas has been put on hold. There's no time to shop.
Wood will have to have regular checkups to make sure the pellet inside his head isn't going to cause further problems.
"We may be looking at a lifetime of medical problems," Cumbee said. "We don't know."
An account to help with expenses has been set up in Wood's name at the National Bank of Blacksburg. Checks or donations should be marked with his name, account number 12-737-2. Donations can be taken to the bank, or mailed to P.O. Box 11442, Blacksburg, Va., 24062-1442.
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. Deborah Wood visits her son, Jasonby CNBWood, at Roanoke Memorial. The BB pellet he was shot with will
remain lodged in his brain. color.