victims of shootings

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But his mother said she was marching and fighting “so the next Damian will have a chance.”
There are four adult trauma centers in the city, Northwestern and Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital on the North Side and Mount Sinai Hospital Medical Center and the John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County on the West Side.
“I would really like to see another trauma center on the South Side,” said Leslee Stein-Spencer, the fire department’s manager of medical administration and regulatory compliance. “We believe it is needed. It would definitely help with our transport and response time. There’s only so much paramedics can do in the back of an ambulance.”
The march concluded close to where the hospital is building a $700 million pavilion.
“Trauma centers have been in financial difficulties for years,” Ms. Potter said. “But how much is a life worth? Our saying is nobody really cares unless they’re face down in a ditch. Then all of a sudden having a trauma center is a priority.”
“Happy birthday, dear Damian. Happy birthday to you.”
Nationally, only 10 percent of hospitals have trauma units, and a mere 200 of those have Level 1 units for the most severe and complicated injuries, said Connie Potter, president of the Trauma Center Association of America, a group that advocates for more government financing of the trauma-care system.
“I was an innocent bystander, just like Damian,” she said, adding that she was treated and released the same night.
“He got me into activism,” Ms. Rush said. “He loved to help people. Just picture him in the front of the line with the biggest mouth with a bullhorn. That’s my son.”
“We drew the entire South Side,” said John Easton, a spokesman for the medical center. “That became overwhelming. It put an enormous strain on the hospital.”
Before heading back to the corner where Mr. Turner was shot, now marked by a family of teddy bears, candles and plastic roses in a makeshift memorial, the marchers sang.
Many trauma victims are young,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], poor and uninsured, or otherwise unable to pay, Ms. Potter said. Trauma cases often bump and postpone elective surgeries, “which is what hospitals make their money on,” she said.
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There are no trauma centers for adults on Chicago’s South Side, where there are pockets with high rates of violence, including drive-by shootings. Trauma patients on the city’s Far South Side are usually taken to the busy unit at Advocate Christ Medical Center in suburban Oak Lawn, more than 10 miles from where Mr. Turner was shot.

Ms. Rush said her son had been talking about starting a campaign to reopen the local trauma center long before he died. He was a co-founder of the youth wing of a neighborhood advocacy group called Southside Together Organizing for Power, or STOP. He traveled with the group to several cities, including Detroit, Minneapolis and New Orleans, where he joined a protest against the demolition of public housing.
“It’s not just about my son,” Ms. Rush said. “Too many youth are dying when they don’t have to.”
Demonstrators for a trauma center at the University of Chicago Hospital.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative
His trip to the Northwestern trauma center took just 10 minutes, according to the fire department. His sister, Jasmine, said Mr. Turner was barely breathing after he stumbled into and collapsed on the floor of her home in Grove Parc Apartments. “You could tell he was dying,” she said.
But treating trauma — victims of shootings, stabbings, car crashes and other accidents — is highly specialized and expensive. Level 1 trauma centers are staffed with 16 medical specialists, like brain surgeons and orthopedic experts, 24 hours a day.
She said that since she buried her son, the youngest of her five children, she had been working to have the trauma center at the university reopened.
Tuesday would have been Mr. Turner’s 19th birthday. But instead of ice cream and cake, his mother choked down another day’s worth of grief along with some pills for her weak heart. Then — her breathing labored, her legs aching — she slowly followed a march of about 100 friends, neighbors and university students from the corner where her son was shot, through the streets of Woodlawn and Hyde Park, ending near the entrance to the medical center.
“This hospital has blood-stained hands,” the Rev. Andre Smith, the pastor who officiated at Mr. Turner’s funeral, said in an angry and anguished prayer at the protest. Mr. Turner was shot in the back around midnight near the corner of 61st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, a violent patch of the city plagued by a longtime feud between rival street gangs.

The marchers chanted, “U. of C. is whack, bring the trauma center back.” And “How can you ignore, we’re dying at your door?”
“The hospital doesn’t want the bill for poor people,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” Ms. Rush said.
Ms. Rush said friends took her to the U. of C. hospital, the closest one at the time, after she was shot in the hip 14 years ago while standing at her front door in the Grove Parc complex.
The hospital continues to operate a trauma center for children 16 and under because, Mr. Easton said, “we felt a greater obligation to help children.”
A few weeks shy of his 19th birthday, Damian Turner, a charismatic youth advocate and aspiring musician, was gunned down in a drive-by shooting on Aug. 15 — four blocks from one of the best hospitals in the world, the University of Chicago Medical Center in Hyde Park.
“It would have taken about a minute in a vehicle to get Damian to the U. of C. hospital,” his mother, Sheila Rush, said the other day, as she prepared to join a march protesting what she said was a gaping hole in the city’s emergency health care system. “My sweet baby could still be alive today if the U. of C. had a trauma center. It’s just down the street.”

The University of Chicago, which had one of the busiest trauma centers in the state, got out of trauma care in 1988, largely because of costs.
Officials at individual hospitals decide whether to have a trauma center, which must meet certification requirements, particularly involving staffing and training. “There used to be a lot more in the city,” Ms. Stein-Spencer said.
But even if there had been a trauma center four blocks away or right next door, no one knows if Mr. Turner could have been saved. Nicknamed Mo Joe for his Mohawk haircut, Mr. Turner was a strapping teenager who friends said loved music and making people laugh.
“This should be a grieving time for me,” she said. “But I can’t rest or grieve until we get some justice.”
Mr. Easton, the medical center spokesman, said that if trauma victims managed to get to the emergency room on their own, the hospital would stabilize them and assess their injuries and either treat them or transfer them to a trauma center.
But rather than rush the gravely wounded teenager there, Chicago Fire Department paramedics were required to drive him to the nearest Level 1 trauma center, which was more than nine miles across the city at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on the northern edge of downtown. Mr. Turner was pronounced dead less than 90 minutes after the bullet ripped into his back.