DETROIT _ His pager buzzed three times with a message: level one gsw pediatric. Life-threatening trauma. Gunshot wound. Child.
Ray Winans swiped his key card and opened the doors to the busiest emergency room in one of the deadliest U.S. cities.
"Where's the GSW?" he asked a security guard.
"Back over there."
Winans sidestepped a cluster of empty wheelchairs and strode down a long corridor.
"Where is he at?" he asked a nurse.
"Room 2."
Winans, 39, took a long breath, then pulled back the beige curtain. Mario Brown, who had just turned 17, had yet to arrive from a CT scan of his abdomen and the .22-caliber bullet lodged in it.
His sister, whose clasped hands rested on her lap, and his cousin, who had Mario's blood on his pants, were slumped in chairs against the wall. Both had tears in their eyes.
"I'm not the police," Winans told them. "I'm here to help you all. I'm here for you."
They stared at the empty bed.
Winans works for a program started two years ago at Detroit's Sinai-Grace Hospital aimed at breaking a cycle of violence that dates back decades.
It was started by an emergency room physician, Tolulope Sonuyi, after he noticed that many of his shooting patients looked familiar: He had treated them for gunshot wounds before.
With $200,000 in grant money, he recruited Winans and another counselor who both had their own violent histories and formed Detroit Life is Valuable Everyday, or D.L.I.V.E.
"They've lived lives out here on the streets of Detroit," Sonuyi said.
A counselor meets with every gunshot or stabbing patient between age 14 and 30. Nearly 90 percent of them _ 80 in total, all black _ have joined the program, which involves months or years of one-on-one meetings and peer support sessions.
In a city with the third-highest homicide rate in the nation _ behind St. Louis and Baltimore _ Sonuyi said that none have been shot or stabbed again.
He says that shows the violence afflicting many poor, black communities nationwide can be halted.
Winans sees each case as an opportunity that might never come again.
He would wait for Mario.
