During the 60 seconds the father was alone in my office, he saw the color photograph of his son with the gunshot wound on my desk and picked it up. When I came out of the vault with the gun to release to him, we locked eyes and stared at each other. We both had that “deer in the headlights” look and were unsure how to act.
Plano Police Department dispatch had called back to ID 24 hours earlier and said an ambulance was transporting a non-critical gunshot victim to the hospital. I was the ID Supervisor. It sounded like a simple enough assignment, so I told Karen to run out to the hospital and take a few photographs. She was about 20, newly married, and this was her first job. She was just out of training and I wanted to know how she would handle a call on her own. She grabbed her camera and headed out.
The victim was a local high school boy. He had been helping his widowed grandmother clean her house. He spotted a little small caliber semi-automatic handgun on top of a high piece of furniture. He realized it had been his grandfather’s gun but his grandmother did not know it was there. He discreetly took the little gun and stuffed it into his waistband where it was hidden by his untucked shirt.
After he was finished at his grandmothers, he drove to the Dairy Queen to meet his friends. A group of kids was standing around in the parking lot. He called to his buddies that he had something to show them. As they gathered around the driver’s door, the boy reached into his waistband to pull out the weapon. It discharged into his genitalia.
Karen was unfazed by what she saw and did an amazing job. She returned with the small handgun and a roll of exposed 35mm film. I took the film into the darkroom, developed it, printed a contact sheet, and then enlarged the most descriptive photo. That was the print the father was holding when our eyes met.
We stared at each other for maybe ten seconds, both of us a little panicked and afraid of the other’s reaction. Then simultaneously, we both broke out laughing.
The boy was on his back in the hospital bed. Karen had peeled the sheet back. The boy’s pants, underwear, and shoes had been removed. In order to get the best angle to show the full effect of the wound, Karen had knelt down at the foot of the bed. With the camera poised so that the boy’s socked feet were just inside the frame of the photographed, Karen had snapped the shutter aiming directly up between the boy’s legs.
The kid, aware he was being photographed, stretched his neck up and leaned his head forward to stare directly into the lens. Then he smiled for the camera!
So there he was in the photograph, a big smile on his face, with his left testicle hanging out by a cord beneath his scrotum.
After the boy’s father quit laughing, he said, “Well, he still has one left. I can still be a grandfather someday.”
I released his father’s gun back to him. I don’t know whether he returned it to his Mom, or kept it as a family heirloom for his son.