Home > Today's Christian
> 2003
> May/June
She Is Not Silent
My daughter was raped, shot three times, and left for dead. But God wanted her to live—and now we know why.
By Michael Kelly
 2 of 7
He did it at gunpoint. During her horror, she prayed to survive—but she knew what would come next.
These, she said, were the worst moments, when she thought she would die in an ugly field far from her family. The rapist didn't want to look her in the eyes as he killed her, so he told her to turn around.
From about five feet away, he fired a 9 mm bullet into her back, just left of her spine. The bullet missed her heart and exited below her left breast. She fell.
He stood over her and fired again. The bullet entered her upper-left buttock, ripped through her colon and exited just above the pubic area. For good measure, he fired again, the third bullet slashing across her lower back and creasing the flesh of her right elbow.
Somehow she played dead. He drove off, and she began crawling. Bridget tried to get up but fell, fearing she would pass out and bleed to death.
Then, she says, she felt she was lifted up by God. She rose—and was amazed that her legs worked.
She walked, stumbled and ran 200 yards to homes. She tried one house, where a terrified woman didn't open the door but, at 3:41 A.M., did call 911.
Bridget, losing strength, didn't know that. She staggered next door, where Frank James, a 43-year-old retired Army veteran of the Persian Gulf War and Somalia, was awakened by her cries. He opened the door and saw her naked, bleeding, and curled in a fetal position.
"Oh, my God!" he said to a family member. "Get a blanket."
Almost unbelievably, the bullets hadn't struck Bridget's spine, heart, lungs, or a major blood vessel.
Mr. James knew gunshot wounds when he saw them. In Somalia, he was three blocks away when the famed Black Hawk went down. On the mantel of his living room sits a picture from Somalia—of himself and Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, now Secretary of State.
At 3:49 A.M., as I slept unaware hundreds of miles away in Omaha, Nebraska, Mr. James knelt over my daughter, comforting her and protecting her. (She said she could tell by his actions that he was a father.) A police officer arrived, quickly radioing Bridget's description of her attacker.
Rescuers took Bridget in an ambulance to the hospital. She kept asking if she would live, and could they call her father?
A surgeon, Dr. Jon Bruce, assessed her wounds and watched her blood pressure drop. If they had arrived at the hospital any later, he said, she would have died.
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