Second of three parts
Pam and Terry Kennedy were working at their small hotel on Tortola when they got the telephone call at about 10 minutes to 4 p.m. on April 25. Their 19-year-old son, Geoffrey Brian Kennedy, had been shot on St. Thomas an hour earlier and was in the emergency room of the Roy L. Schneider Hospital.
The 4 o'clock ferry to St. Thomas "was the Native Son, and they held the boat for us," Pam Kennedy recalls, speaking slowly and precisely in a voice resonating with stress. When they got to the St. Thomas hospital, she says, "My son was on the table. He said, ‘I love you, Mom.' He explained that he had no sensation from the waist down; he couldn't feel his feet or legs. He was very thirsty. Of course, he couldn't drink anything, because they didn't want that bullet moved. I kept wetting his lips."
The bullet was lodged in his back, close to the aorta, the largest blood vessel in the body. It got there, Geoff Kennedy says, when he tried to flee a youth who had first tried to sell him drugs, then demanded his wallet and then shot him in the back as he tried to get away.
Also in the emergency room were two young people from St. John — Lesley Castle, Geoff Kennedy's former girlfriend and still best friend, and another of their friends, Jerome O'Connell.
The young people had all been planning to have dinner on St. John that night to celebrate Lesley's 18th birthday. Instead, "we received a call from the Roy L. Schneider Hospital with the news that Geoff was hurt," Lesley's mother, Mary Castle Bartolucci, says. "He was conscious and asked the nurse to call Lesley to come and be with him. At that point, we were not aware of what had happened other than that it was serious and his parents were on their way from Tortola.
"When Lesley arrived, the first thing Geoff said to her was ‘Happy birthday, Lesley.' This was while he was lying in the trauma room with a bullet in his back and a great deal of pain."
At the hospital, Pam Kennedy relates, her son "was coherent, he was able to speak, he was able to move his arms. They did a cat scan on him and had seen the bullet, between the 9th and 10th vertebrae, between his shoulder blades. The doctor in charge told us, outside the room, not in Geoff's presence, ‘He won't be walking again.'"
That night, Geoff Kennedy was transported to Puerto Rico by air ambulance. "They allowed only one person on the medevac," his mother recalls. "Terry went." He would spend the better part of the next month in Puerto Rico while she kept their hotel operation going.
Meantime, their older son, Craig, was finishing his senior year at Dennison University in Ohio. When the 21-year-old heard what had happened, "He wanted to come home, but we said no, to complete his exams and finish up and graduate on time," his mother says. She flew to Ohio for his graduation while her husband stayed with Geoff. When she returned, Craig came home with her. He'll be in the islands until mid-summer, when he starts a job on the mainland.
Geoff Kennedy spent six days in intensive care and another 18 in intermediate care. Last week, he took up residence in Health South, a rehabilitation center, where he is expected to remain until July.
The Kennedys' decision to have their son stay in Puerto Rico for rehabilitation therapy was based on two things, his mother says: "First, the facilities — they are excellent. And second, we would be able to go over and visit him. If he were in the States, it would be almost impossible for us to fly back and forth."
Three things weigh heavily on Pam Kennedy. The first is how her younger son will cope with the difficult times ahead. The second is how she and her husband will adapt their daily lives to accommodate Geoff's needs. And the third is the fact that they have been given no indication that police on St. Thomas have done or are doing anything to investigate the shooting.
At the Schneider emergency room, Terry Kennedy says, a uniformed officer asked his son some questions. "She seemed to have all the answers," he recalls. He says his son told the officer his assailant "had come up and tried to sell him some dope and had hit him over the head several times with the pistol."
Pam Kennedy later contacted the policeman who had gone to the scene of the shooting, Sgt. Anthony Hunt. "He had some emergency medical training," she says of the officer. "He alerted everybody not to touch Geoff, so that the bullet would not dislodge. The bullet was very close to the aorta, and my son could have been dead."
The family had no further contact with police, Terry Kennedy says, until Sgt. Reynold Fraser called the hotel where he has been staying in Puerto Rico about two and a half weeks ago and left a message. He returned the call to the officer, who asked how Geoff was doing and when he could show him some photographs. "But they've never called back or come over to see him," Terry Kennedy says.
Back at home on Tortola last week while his son was going through his first week of intensive rehabilitation therapy at Health South, Terry Kennedy said, "He's angry; he's worried. I'm angry. The doctors say . . . he may be able to stand with braces and crutches, but will not be able to walk."
They've been short-handed at the hotel, and meanwhile, "My wife is up all hours of the night on the Internet looking for things that might help. I'm walking around and thinking, ‘How do people get around here with wheelchairs?' It's something I had never thought about. He's saying, ‘I can't go there anymore because of the steps.' You don't know how much of the world is turned off to a person. . ."
Pam Kennedy has been trying to learn where they can acquire "a special type of wheelchair because of the terrain. All the information I have is for typical city chairs."
Terry Kennedy served in the Merchant Marine and loved the seafaring life. He understands the anguish when his son, who has done a couple of sailboat ocean-crossing deliveries, talks about "how he was going to sail boats all over the world."
And yet, the father says, his son "wants to come back to Tortola. He wants to be where his friends are. I said, ‘We can go back to the States,' and he said, ‘But I don't have any friends there. My friends are in the Virgin Islands.' He moved here at 9, and he said, ‘This is my home.'"
Hope for the Kennedys has been a yo-yo. His second week in the hospital, he developed meningitis, an inflammation of the membranes enveloping the spinal cord; but medication brought it under control. About the same time he felt "a slight tingle in his right toe," his mother elatedly e-mailed a friend. What did it mean? Maybe something, maybe nothing; only time will tell.
Then came the additional blow they didn't need. "Our insurance does not cover the physical therapy," Terry Kennedy says quietly. "They turned us down. Therapy for a month to two months. All the changes we have to make in the house and everything. . ."
The family has made inquiries regarding the territory's Crime Victims Compensation Fund and is hoping that some financial support may be forthcoming. Friends are talking about organizing a fund-raising effort.
Reports circulating to the effect that Geoff Kennedy was the victim of a drug deal gone wrong infuriate his father. "This is absolutely asinine," he says. "Geoff is not a drug user. To have someone insinuate something like that is ridiculous."
"What keeps me going," Pam Kennedy says, "is the fact that my son is a good person and he thinks about people quite a bit. I have had his friends from St. Thomas and St. John call and e-mail, and I've had community support in the forms of prayers and well-wis
hes on Tortola."
Her husband adds, "We've gotten tons of e-mail. We've had prayer groups all over the place via the Internet. It shows you that there is good in the world, that there are still among the rotten apples a hell of a lot of good, nice people."
The Internet has been an interesting element of the family's support system in yet another way. Friends turned Geoff Kennedy on to a chat room for people who are facing challenges comparable to those before him now.
Meantime, the young man's popularity has prompted outpourings of concern and support on Tortola, his father says. "I called up the electric company to ask how long a blackout was going to last, and the person on the other end of the line said, ‘We don't know — but how is Geoff doing?' Another day I called the bank to check on a balance, and an employee there that Geoff knows — a lady who's handicapped — said, ‘Tell him to keep up hope.'
At the same time, the parents recognize that the outpouring will be hard to sustain. "Right now there is a lot of pathos," Pam Kennedy reflects. "But in six months, there's going to be Christmas parties. He's going to need friends then."
"Geoff has a very clear memory of what happened" and has described the incident in detail to family and friends," Bartolucci says. "My question to the police is, ‘What is being done?' Why hasn't anyone gone to see him in Puerto Rico?"
She adds, "It angers me when we start to question the victim and ignore the criminal. When are we going to get angry enough to say ‘Enough!'? For anyone who thought, ‘Oh, he was probably in the wrong place and trying to buy drugs,' let me assure you: It could have been your child."
The week before Geoff Kennedy was transferred to the rehabilitation center, Bartolucci wrote to the Source: "Does the community realize that there is a criminal out there with a .38 who has already severely injured someone and the next time may kill? This was not a frightened kid who did this. This is a person without conscience. Have we become so desensitized that when a young man full of promise is shot and paralyzed, it doesn't matter?"
Similarly, Pam Kennedy wonders, "When are all these perpetrators going to get caught? When are they going to have justice done to them for how they have hurt society? They took away somebody's future — I don't know, for money to spend on Carnival? Drugs? Maybe if some of them had to go through the hurt that they had caused other people, some of it would stop. . ."
Lesley Castle has put her indelible impressions of encountering her best friend in the emergency room into written form. To read what she wrote, click on Open Forum.
Wednesday: The status of the criminal investigation