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A Miami woman was left with a bullet in her head in an injury that medical personnel initially looked over as a minor wound. The injury was apart of a drive-by shooting that one victim believes was a hate crime.
According to NBC News, the shooting took place around 7:30 p.m. last Tuesday in the southwest part of Miami, leaving Shakena Jefferson and two guys with gunshot wounds. All of the victims were gay and Clive Khouri believes it stemmed from a kiss he says he had with his boyfriend in the car.
He told NBC that he was sitting with his boyfriend when a group of all-terrain vehicles surround the car and sprayed it with bullets. His boyfriend was shot in the head and taken to Jackson South Trauma Center in critical condition. Khouri says he thinks he and his boyfriend were targeted because the shooter “probably saw us kissing in the car.”
“When I tried to speed off to come around this corner, they kept trying to shoot, shoot, shoot,” Khouri said. He also suffered bullet injuries, although they were considered non-life-threatening. His godmother, Lilian Brown, also believes the attack could’ve been a hate crime. “Everyone that got hurt is gay,” she explained.
Janet Medley, the wife of Shakena Jefferson, told ABC News that the two were preparing to go grocery shopping and were getting into a car outside their house when the bullets started flying.
Medley said she hit her knee badly opening the car door, but was never able to enter the vehicle. “God was protecting me. I had angels protecting me because I was outside and I couldn’t shield myself and bullets were just flying and nary a bullet hit me,” Medley said. “If I had gotten into the car, I would have been dead because a bullet went right over the driver’s seat.”
Unfortunately, Jefferson was sitting in the passenger seat when a bullet hit her. The two were taken to a hospital where they were treated and released around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, according to Medley. However, once they were home, Jefferson started complaining that she felt pain in her head, according to Medley.
“My wife told me that she was having these terrible headaches and she felt something moving in her head,” Medley said. “She was experiencing short-term memory loss. She couldn’t remember anything. She kept on repeating the same thing over and over.”
On Friday, Medley said she took Jefferson to Baptist Hospital, where doctors immediately X-rayed her head to find a bullet still lodged inside.
Luckily, Jefferson is expected to make a full recovery after surgery. The couple of 21 years remains angry at the initial treatment Jefferson received. They plan on hiring a lawyer to take legal action against the hospital.
“They put the Band-Aid on her head, gave her antibiotics and just sent her home,” Medley said. “We could have done that ourselves at home.”
Detective Argemis Colome of the Miami-Dade Police Department said no arrests were made in the shooting and investigators are still trying to identify multiple shooters. He added that investigators haven’t classified the shooting as a hate crime.
“We’re definitely looking into it as a very violent crime. We’ll see if we get more information and if it does come to that, then obviously there will be an additional charge that we can add,” Colome said. “As of now, we don’t have enough to determine that. We’re not discarding it, but we don’t have enough right now to definitely make that an additional charge.”
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