Father credits shot teen’s friend with saving her life

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2015 (3690 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This one felt personal, deeply so.

But only after I learned who had been shot.

It’s been almost seven years since I first met Calli Vanderaa and her single dad, Corey Vanderaa.

She was only nine, but the bright-eyed, outgoing, animal-loving little girl wanted to share the story about a seven-week-old puppy she and her dad had rescued from a garbage container behind their rented North End home in “the ’hood” where the charred remains of the rest of the litter were found at the bottom of the bin.

Jessie, she named her. And when Jesse was five months old, Calli decided to print a poem about what happened and send it to the Free Press.

The single sheet from a three-ring binder and the poem — with her little girl’s question, “How can people be so cruel?” — ended up on my desk.

And, for a short time, through a series of columns, I ended up in her and her dad’s life. Then, on Wednesday, I was in their lives again. Except, this time, the now 16-year-old Calli was the victim of inexplicable cruelty and violence.

It was Corey who wanted Calli to speak with me when I reached him in her room at the Health Sciences Centre. It was just five days after a bullet from a stolen, RCMP-issue gun was fired through the front passenger seat where it struck Calli just below her left breast, puncturing her lung and doing near fatal internal damage.

“I’m all right,” Calli said when I asked. “How are you?”

“You’re doing well?” I asked, hardly believing she was able to talk so soon after what happened.

“Yeah.”

“Has the pain subsided?”

“Yeah.”

And then she had to go.

“Daddy,” she said, “you’re getting another call.”

That’s how I remember them. Her calling him “Daddy,” him always being concerned about her welfare and the two of them being so close.

We had some catching up to do, though. Some things hadn’t changed. Corey is still driving a truck, although he has had to quit hauling for Lafarge as of this week in anticipation of having to care for his daughter.

Eventually, Corey and Calli moved out of one of the most dangerous areas of the North End and into suburban Charleswood for a time, and Jessie the dog was loaned out to a relative in the Neepawa area, where she’s now happily herding cows. Dad and daughter didn’t stay long in Charleswood because Calli wanted to play basketball at River East Collegiate, so the two of them moved out that way.

Corey said Calli is in Grade 11 but taking a Grade 12 law course because she wants to be a lawyer. “A criminal lawyer.”

But I wondered how Calli views a career in law now. And her future.

Corey began to weep. “She thinks she’s going to die,” he said. “I keep telling her she’s not. Everything’s OK. She’s scared she’s going to leave me alone.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told Corey.

“She’s more concerned about me and her grandmother and her dog… than she is herself.”

As for Calli’s understandable fear of dying, Corey said she would have died if it hadn’t been for one of her friends, the only one allowed to visit her at the hospital.

“The one who saved her life,” he said, “her best friend.”

Later, Corey would introduce me to 17-year-old Kailey Compton (not her real name. That’s the name she uses on Facebook because her mother is concerned about her daughter’s security).

Kailey, who has only known Calli for a year, explains their closeness this way: “She’s a second me and I’m a second her.”

Calli was visiting Kailey at her pal’s Windsor Park home last weekend when the two best friends and five male companions drove to the neighbourhood Mac’s convenience store and chanced upon two young men on bikes flashing gang hand signs at them. Kailey said she was the one who noticed one of the men, both of whom were strangers to her, had a gun. She warned the others. Calli was the first one who made it back to the car, climbing into the front passenger seat and behind the hoped-for-safety of locked doors. Kailey said the shot was fired point blank through the window Calli was sitting curled up behind. The car sped off, but it wasn’t until they were on their way Calli began screaming that she had been shot. At first, none of them believed her, Kailey recalled. By the time they reached a nearby community centre parking lot, Calli was screaming for her daddy and for her friends to save her. Kailey had already called 911 and soon would be using her hands and clothing to apply pressure to Calli’s wound.

“We need to hold something on it, to stop the bleeding,” Kailey recalled telling the others in the car.

How did she know how to do that?

“Because I’ve watched a lot of Criminal Minds,” Kailey smiled. “Like, you know, that’s what you do.”

Calli still lost six pints of blood from the time she was shot until she got to the HSC emergency, her dad said. Calli was in surgery for more than eight hours. “The surgeon basically told me Kailey’s a superhero,” Corey said. “She saved Calli’s life.”

And what did Calli say when she was finally out of critical condition Monday and heard what her second self had done?

“Wow,” was the first reaction.

I remember being worried for Calli when I first met that bright-eyed, outgoing, animal-loving little girl when she was nine.

It was the neighbourhood she was living in back then, where she was bullied because she was white, and dead humans and dead dogs were being found basically in their backyard.

I wanted the dad and daughter to move, and they did.

But sometimes it’s not the neighbourhood. It’s just what happens when kids drop by a convenience store to get a drink.

It was early on the morning of June 29 this year when Calli posted this update on her Facebook page: “1am seven eleven run”

At 1:46 a.m. the same morning, one of her friends responded in these words: “don’t get killed.”

Calli answered immediately. “I’m already home. Alive. Breathing Okay.”

And soon, thankfully, she will be again.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca