Point Blank Body Armor

SHOT SIX TIMES: Fighting the Bullets

28-year-old motivated to join police force by father's violent past still battling odds to recover from gunshots

By FRANK CURRERI - REVIEW-JOURNAL

As a young boy, Enrique Hernandez deeply loved his father. But he vowed to be nothing like him.

Hernandez's father, Ampelio, was a convicted felon who died in prison. Enrique, raised by his grandmother, was determined to be a law-abiding citizen.

The clean-living son served eight years in the U.S. Marines Corps before getting a job with the Metropolitan Police Department.

"There have only been a couple of occasions where I've been that proud: having a girl (baby), being a Marine and being a cop," Hernandez said of joining the police fraternity.

"I know when he died, he was very proud of me," he said of his father. "I can only imagine how he'd feel now that I'm a police officer. ... I think he'd be most proud that his past did not affect my ability to pursue a career that gave me so much fulfillment, that his faults weren't my faults.

"My dad was a criminal, but that did not slow me down. I went on to do the things that were least expected of me. I'm still a police officer. It's kind of like the American Dream."

Though they followed different paths, Enrique Hernandez and his dad have something in common that neither would have wished for: Both almost died from gunshot wounds.

The elder Hernandez, who was shot five times throughout his life, eventually was paralyzed by a bullet that hit his spine.

Enrique Hernandez, as a rookie police officer, was shot six times Dec. 12 by a suicidal suspect who did not want to be deported to Mexico. The officer was left clinging to life at University Medical Center.

Today, Hernandez, 28, is back at home with his wife, Leann, and 1-year-old daughter, Maricela, marching forward on the long, often grueling road to recovery. Though his gait is normal, it's painful for him to walk. He has regained use of his left hand. But severe nerve damage in his right hand makes it hard for him to hold objects and prevents him from firing his service weapon. He is gradually reducing the amount of morphine he's taking for chronic pain.

Despite his injuries, he has returned to work in the department's Public Information Office.

People often ask him about his ordeal, which he can recount vividly. He was patrolling the crime-infested corridor near Eastern Avenue and 28th Street when he noticed a black sport utility vehicle that was not registered.

Even before attempting to pull over the vehicle, Hernandez said he told himself, "If everything checks out, I'll let him go with a warning."

But when Hernandez hit his cruiser's lights and siren, the motorist sped off instead of stopping. The police chase ended when the motorist struck a pole and fled on foot. Hernandez tracked the suspect to a nearby apartment. Hernandez, his gun drawn, entered the apartment cautiously, fearing the suspect might have taken hostages.

Shortly thereafter he was ambushed by gunfire.

The first bullet struck Hernandez in the left hand. The second hit him in the left forearm. A third bullet struck Hernandez's sternum.

Hernandez then shot the suspect in his upper body.

But the wounded suspect kept firing. A fourth bullet ripped through Hernandez's right arm. A fifth tore through his left side. And a sixth bullet went through Hernandez's leg.

Hernandez was ready to collapse in the apartment, but believed the suspect would finish him off with a shot to the back of the head.

"I'm thinking, `No way. I'm not getting executed.'"

Somehow, Hernandez mustered the strength to run from the apartment. Then, he fell to the ground and radioed for help.

Hernandez remembers lying on the ground and banging his head on the pavement.

He was mad at himself. "I can't believe that guy shot me!" he lamented.

Then, Hernandez surveyed his wounds.

He looked at his arms; he couldn't feel the right one at all, but noticed both were still there. His legs were there, too. He was conscious. He observed that he was not coughing up blood, and figured that meant death was not knocking on his door.

This relative calm was brief. It lasted until a bystander came to his side and offered help.

"I didn't think I was going to die," Hernandez said, "until somebody told me, `Don't die on me.' That's not a good thing to tell somebody."

When he arrived at the hospital 18 minutes later, the first familiar face he saw was that of then-Clark County Sheriff Jerry Keller.

Keller said to Hernandez, "All right son, don't worry about anything. You're going to be all right."

Hernandez believed him. "I thought, well, I guess everything is going to be all right." Then, Hernandez, in critical condition, apologized profusely to Keller.

"I'm sorry that I got shot, sir," he told the sheriff.

Leann Hernandez was at home that night watching a local television news broadcast that mentioned an officer had been shot near Eastern Avenue and 28th Street. Knowing that was her husband's turf, she picked up the phone and left a message on his cell phone saying, "I have this really weird feeling it's you. Can you call me back?"

She waited in vain. Then, an officer arrived and said her husband had been shot twice in his bulletproof vest. "So I'm thinking he's bruised." But when she went to the hospital, Keller informed her that her spouse of four years had been hit six times. She didn't cry, but her body started trembling.

"I didn't know what else to do," she said.

When she first saw her husband, his neck had swelled to the size of a basketball.

He was unconscious for six days. When he awoke he was consumed with what had become of the suspect.

"I remember thinking, `Did they get him?' ... And I heard one of my best friend's say, `Don't worry, bro, they got him. SWAT got him,' " Hernandez recalled of the death of the suspect, Saul Morales Garcia, who was shot later that night after raising his weapon at a SWAT team. "It was almost like I could relax knowing that guy had been apprehended."

Leann Hernandez said she never thought of life without her husband.

"I never once cried," she said. "I never once thought he wasn't going to make it. I felt like, he's always been the strong one, so I had to be strong for him and Maricela."

Hernandez, bedridden for the first time in his life, briefly pondered walking away from the police profession.

"When I first woke up I told myself, `How could I ever go back to being a police officer?' " he said. "But when I got out of the hospital, I thought there's nothing else I would be happy doing."

Going home after 11 days in the hospital was when the hardest work began. Hernandez could barely move for two months.

"I washed him. I fed him. I brushed his teeth. If he had to go potty, I had to go with him. Everything," Leann Hernandez recalled.

Hernandez can't play with Maricela as he used to on the floor or balance her with one hand. He still can't wake up in the morning at 4 a.m. to jog or work out.

"I'm so embarrassed because I used to be in such great shape," said Hernandez, who used to bench press 225 pounds seven times and jog three miles in about 21 minutes. "I always worked out."

Three bullets are still in his body.

The only rigorous rehabilitation Hernandez can do now is therapy for his hands. The exercises for his right arm and the nerve damage are tremendously painful, said his hand specialist, Audrey Lloyd-Davies. Hernandez, even with help from pain medication, often screams because of the pain.

But Lloyd-Davies likes Hernandez's chances of regaining functional use of his right arm.

"He is so motivated," she said. "He'll tell me, `Don't stop, keep doing it.' He knows that the pain is helping him. It's probably the Marines' ethics."

Sheriff Bill Young, when awarding him the Medal of Valor and Purple Heart last week, predicted Hernandez would return to patrolling the streets.

Hernandez, a natural right-hander, has been going to the firing range to train as a leftie. "Within nine months to a year I should be back out there to defend the community I am sworn to protect," he said. "I feel like I need to get out there and help put the bad people away. Maybe it's because my dad was a criminal.

"I've still got a long way to go, but the worst is over."