CLEVELAND, Ohio – Early on the morning of July 12, a young woman walked into MetroHealth Medical Center’s emergency room, bleeding from the face after being pistol-whipped at a gas station.
“My face,” the woman said, seeing the image of her injuries. “My face.”
Her brother met her with a hug and assured her that he would retaliate. Moments later, Jeff Crosby, a violence interrupter for the Cleveland Peacekeepers Alliance, stepped in to prevent that.
Amid Cleveland’s most violent months, the hospital emergency room has become a place that not only treats victims of violence but also works to prevent more crimes from occurring.
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer spent a night at MetroHealth, the city’s safety-net hospital, to see how doctors, nurses and community advocates work with families at their worst moments, as loved ones deal with trauma.
Crosby, 46, drew on his experience as a former gang member when he pulled aside the pistol-whipped victim’s family shortly after hearing of the threat.
He calls it “trench knowledge.”
A family member recognized Crosby, whose primary technique is simple: He gets people to weigh the pros and cons of retaliating. The method itself isn’t revolutionary. But given Crosby’s credibility, people listen to him.
The whole conversation took about a minute. When Crosby walked away, he said he was confident that there wouldn’t be any revenge.
“If I hear the beef is about to happen, (I) jump on it ahead of time,” Crosby said.
The goal is to prevent more violence. Crosby has leaned on his network – “I know someone in every hood” – and his reputation as a former gang member to convince people to solve their problems without violence.
“I realized I had a voice, and I didn’t realize the power of the voice until later,” Crosby said.
Advocates have said Cleveland needs more Crosbys. On July 12, MetroHealth doctors and nurses saw three gunshot victims, two of whom walked out of the emergency room with bullets lodged inside them. One of them returned to where he was shot, even though he was wearing only a hospital gown and ankle monitor.
Crosby tried to talk to another gunshot wound victim while he was in the emergency room, but the man was in too much pain. His girlfriend, holding him in the hospital bed, yelled at hospital staff for not moving more quickly, but doctors were waiting on CT scan test results before attempting surgery.
Frustrated, the gunshot wound victim walked out of the hospital, leaning on his girlfriend, dazed, in his gown.
The third gunshot victim was being seen by medical professionals, and his family declined an interview.
A hospital’s niche
In a city with three major hospital systems, MetroHealth fits a special niche. It takes patients regardless of their ability to pay, and it is
largely funded by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance payments
. Cuyahoga County taxpayers also contribute $35 million a year toward the hospital’s $2 billion budget.
UH Medical Center and MetroHealth are the city’s two Level 1 trauma centers for adults. Because of that, MetroHealth sees many of the city’s gunshot victims.
Nurse Megan Kunker said the medical professionals at MetroHealth are proud of the role they fill in. She likened the Cleveland Clinic to someone wearing a suit and tie and University Hospitals to someone wearing a pair of khakis and a polo shirt.
As for MetroHealth, “We’re like nose rings and tattoos,” Kunker said. “Most of us love that we serve the underserved and the uninsured.”
“I wish we could do more,” Kunker said.
In many ways, that’s where people like Crosby come in. He is far from the only member of Peacemakers trying defuse violence before it jumps into gunfire and murder, and Peacekeepers is not the only organization with that goal.
One of Crosby’s colleagues, social worker Monica Lee, is an example of that. The two often work together. While Crosby was listening to the family of the pistol-whip victim express a desire for revenge, Lee was at the woman’s bedside, trying to convince her to fill out a police report so she could get her medical bills covered by the Victims of Crime Act.
Desensitized
Lee, who works for MetroHealth, is a social worker who connects victims of violence with key services such as housing, food and counseling. Previously, she worked in the corrections system.
During her time as a social worker, Lee has noticed many people who live in neighborhoods plagued by violence become “desensitized” to the sound of gunfire because it is so common. That all changes, however, when someone gets struck by a bullet, she said.
“It kind of wakes you up, and especially it depends on where you get hit at, like some people get hit in their back. When they come into the hospital, they start thinking, ‘I could have been paralyzed. I could have been killed. (The bullet) could have went into my heart,” Lee said. “And so that reality starts to hit you.”
Lee and Crosby’s jobs require seeing death and its consequences on families. These are deeply painful situations, but they are situations they encounter so frequently that Lee acknowledges they, too, have become desensitized to the horrors of violence. It wasn’t always like that.
“When I first started doing this, I remember my first day, I literally went home and cried. I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” Lee said.
To cope, Lee likes to travel, while Crosby collects exotic pets. He has a cockatoo, a kinkajou, a ball python, a 30-pound rabbit named Smokey and a flying squirrel that likes to sit in the chest pocket of his shirts.
“I’m not like the Tiger King,” Crosby said. “I’m not going to get something that will kill me.”
Crosby said his pets are more than a distraction.
“They taught me empathy,” Crosby said of his pets.
Recovery
Violence prevention is more than just a conversation in the chaotic wake of a violent injury. It is also the follow-up in the weeks or months in the time it takes to recover.
Roughly a month ago, a man was playing basketball when he heard gunshots and saw people running. He felt lightheaded, fell down and woke up in the hospital wounded by gunfire. He had been in a coma for weeks, he said.
The man, who used only the name “Joe” for fear of retribution, is recovering on a bed at MetroHealth. Crosby stopped by his room to check on him. During a 15-minute interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, Joe had to clear his tracheostomy tube, which prevents him from eating anything other than a thickened liquid diet, for the foreseeable future.
“They can’t give me a cup of water. I can’t eat a pack of noodles,” he said.
As Joe recovered in the hospital, suffering the lingering mental and physical scars of the shooting, he admitted a few times he had “destruction on the brain,” but Crosby was able to help calm him down.
“I mean, a few times he came down here and talked to me, I was just ready to spaz out,” Joe said of Crosby. “He was like ‘young brother, that ain’t the way you go about it.’”
“That stuff hurts,” Joe said of his injuries.
“It hurts,” agrees Crosby, who has survived multiple shootings.
Joe expressed gratitude for his recovery and the help of the doctors. He also said he was grateful that Crosby would check on him and help his family pay for hospital parking and get food if needed.
“The doctors and everybody, they’re good people and all that, but Jeff, he comes through. He keeps it real,” Joe said. He talks to the youth about the ups and downs… stuff like that. He tries to give out advice.”
Joe expects his recovery to take another five months, with two to three of those being in the hospital.
“I’m blessed. For real,” he said. “I could have been dead. I’m over here angry, but I could have been (dead).”
