Deadly Silence

Life sidelined

Life is different now for one man who survived a shooting that killed his friend

By Maureen Boyle, Enterprise staff writer
   BROCKTON — Rosando Marcelino lived his life on the street, running with his “boys.”
   Then, as he sat in a van on Green Street, a gunman walked up and opened fire.
   His 17-year-old friend, Shaian Colon, sitting next to him on the front seat, was killed. Another bullet struck Marcelino’s spinal cord.
   He was one of the 48 people to be shot that year.
   He was one of the 43 to survive.
   But survival for Marcelino means a life different from the one he led before the night a gunman opened fire on Green Street in 2006.
   Life for Marcelino — and a handful of other gunshot survivors — is now in a wheelchair.
   “Most of the people I knew that got shot came back the same. I didn’t think I was going to come back like this,” he said.
   The bullet that struck Marcelino’s spinal cord left him paralyzed from the chest down. Instead of spending his days and nights with friends, he spends his time with family in their first-floor apartment.
   He sleeps until 2 or 3 in the afternoon and then, between physical therapy, he will spend time on the phone or on the computer. Sometimes friends visit.
   “I’m mostly inside the house,” he said. “I’m just with my family now.”
   When he leaves the apartment, family and friends help bump his wheelchair down the back steps.
   The number of people shot and wounded in the state and city decreased from 2006 to 2007. The number of non-fatal shootings in Brockton decreased from 43 in 2006 to 28 last year. Throughout the state, the number dropped from 589 in 2006 to 537.
   But those numbers tell just part of the story.
   They don’t tell the story of people like Marcelino, left in wheelchairs.
   “Sometimes, these young men think they are invincible,” said Ollie Jay Spears, a member of the Brockton Peace Crusaders, a community activist group. “They think wherever they go, nothing will happen to them. Far too often, if they don’t die, they end up paralyzed or affected mentally from the experience.... They have no idea about that side of that.”
   In some cases, no arrests are made. Witnesses and even the victims — as in Marcelino’s case - say they don’t know who opened fire.
   The night Marcelino was shot on Green Street in 2006, his mother Maria Marcelino got a phone call and rushed to the hospital. “I was so afraid he would die,” she said.
   She prayed to God that his life would be spared. She spent weeks at her son’s bedside, first at Brockton Hospital and then at Boston Medical Center, where he was transferred shortly after the shooting.
   As his condition improved, tests confirmed what doctors they feared from the start. The bullet struck his spinal cord. Marcelino was paralyzed from the chest down.
   Life for Marcelino – after his release from the hospital 19 days after the shooting, after his release from a rehabilitation center after more than two months — would be very different.
   Before the shooting, he enjoyed spending time away from home, away from his family. His life revolved around music, his friends and, sometimes, court appearances.
   There were shootings on the street, he knew. But it wouldn’t happen to him.
   In the hospital two years ago, listening to a doctor tell him what the rest of his life would be like, Marcelino was forced to face a new reality.
   “They explained I got shot and that I was paralyzed,” Marcelino said. “I didn’t believe them at first.”