Path to healing would begin with an apology

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/11/2015 (3685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week, five days after Calli Vanderaa was shot and nearly killed, I told her father, Corey, that when she was ready to see me — someone who has known the 16-year-old since she was nine and rescued a puppy from a North End garbage bin — to let me know, and I would drop by her room at Health Sciences Centre.

Corey texted on the weekend.

“Hi Gord… I know you’re a busy guy, but Cal said she would love to see you.”

On Sunday, I messaged him and asked when I could see her.

“Any time. We are walking, talking, smiling and waiting for you.”

It was lunchtime when I first saw Corey sitting at the end of Calli’s bed.

Then I peeked around the corner of her curtain, and there was the almost all-grown-up kid I hadn’t seen since she was a such a bright and bubbly shining light of a little girl.

And gave her a kiss on the forehead.

She was smiling and not as tired or in as much pain as when we spoke briefly over her dad’s cellphone last Wednesday.

She was feeling better after the RCMP-issued bullet — fired from a Mountie’s gun, which had been stolen — tore into the left side of her chest, puncturing her lung and coming within two centimetres of her heart before slicing into her spleen and colon and exiting her lower back.

“I found out today I have a broken rib. And, like, it just missed my spine.”

She had only recently learned more about her condition, and who is believed to be the intended target of the gunman — because I haven’t been her only visitor in the last few days.

Her surgeon, Dr. Jeremy Lipschitz, had been by. Calli is fortunate to be alive and, judging by those who know about the experience he brought to Canada from operating on gunshot victims in his native South Africa, Calli was fortunate to have him look after her.

Winnipeg police Deputy Chief Danny Smyth had spent some time with Calli, too. As had investigating officers because she was in better shape to help them learn more about what happened just after midnight on Oct. 24 when a visit to a Windsor Park convenience store with a girlfriend and five guy friends turned into a shooting.

Matthew Wilfred McKay, 22 who allegedly fired the gun Corey describes as a Glock 9-mm is charged with the attempted murder of two people: Calli and a teenage boy.

Calli had been in the front passenger seat of a car, along with the six others who were trying to get away from the gunman.

Calli said the gunman apparently thought the boy in the backseat behind her had said something — “Yelling at them to go away” — and he was the intended target when the gun was pointed through the front passenger-side window where Calli was curled up.

Just before that shot was fired, Calli saw the gunman who was standing beside her window, lift his shirt.

That’s when she saw the weapon.

“And everyone started yelling, ‘Back up, back up.’ ”

At the same time, Calli instinctively shifted her body away from the window.

“I, like turned, and I had my knees up because I didn’t want it to hit my face,” Calli recalled. “I don’t even want to see what’s coming.”

Her girlfriend who was in the car with Calli, and has been credited with saving her life, has visited her in the hospital.

But, while she’s spoken with the boys who were in the car, they haven’t been by.

“It’s understandable,” Calli said.

Even though she was the one who was shot, Calli said she tries to lighten the moment when she talks to them on the phone.

“I try to make jokes with them. But they’re like, ‘No. You’re not even funny.’ ”

Calli has had another visitor.

A counsellor from River East Collegiate, where she’s a Grade 11 student, visited four times before he managed to arrive on a fifth occasion when Calli wasn’t sleeping.

Corey expects his daughter will have another invited visitor this week; lawyer Robert Tapper. Corey is to meet with the Winnipeg litigator today with the intention of launching a lawsuit against the RCMP for negligence because of the use of the service gun and the damage the bullet did to Calli.

And not just physically.

“Now, I’m traumatized,” Calli said.

And she is.

Corey told me the daughter who seemed better when I saw her Sunday, had a rough time emotionally that night.

“I guess she had a nervous breakdown… It just clicked.”

Since it happened, Calli has been given medication.

“She’s OK,” he said.

Over time, hopefully, she will get better. But what would help her in the meantime is a laptop computer so she can do her homework and maybe get her mind back to more normal place.

That, and something else she mentioned. She would like to meet the Mountie who left his weapon in his vehicle. Why?

Calli didn’t say.

Maybe just to hear how he’s feeling. And maybe an apology that could help both of them.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca