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Nov. 19th, 2006 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingFrank Williams was running late on July 16, 2002, as he hurried up Allegheny Avenue, walking to his weekly Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He had to hurry: As a convict on a "pre-release" program, he'd be forced to return to prison if he didn't make the therapy session.
As it turned out, few people have ever paid a steeper price for running late.
By the time Williams crossed Western Avenue on the city's North Side, "I was almost there," he recalls. "I didn't see anything coming. I heard it and then I felt it."
Pop! Pop! Pop!
What he heard -- and then felt -- were gunshots. He's not sure how many there were, exactly: He didn't have time to sort it out.
"All of a sudden, I could feel the bullets rip into my back and I felt this burning sensation move through my body," Williams says. "The pain was horrible laying there on the sidewalk. The worst feeling was that I knew I was probably as good as dead."
Williams, 48, didn't die that night. But sometimes he wishes he had.
"After what I endured," he explains, "there were nights that I would have preferred death to what I was actually going through."
Williams was rushed to nearby Allegheny General Hospital, though he remembers little of that night, where he was listed in critical condition. In the days that followed, his only thought -- when he was coherent enough to have one -- was to simply stay alive. It certainly never occurred to him that he might be thrown in jail as a result of the shooting. After all, he was the victim.
But after Williams was hospitalized for 46 days, records show, state prison guards took him back to prison in handcuffs. He spent the rest of his convalescence in two state prisons: SCI-Pittsburgh, the now-shuttered North Side facility also known as Western Penitentiary, and SCI-Coal Township. There he recovered from multiple gunshot wounds, alternating stints in a prison infirmary with stretches of time in a Restricted Housing Unit -- better known as solitary confinement.
Williams' offense: being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- literally. According to a discipline report made out by prison authorities after the shooting, Williams had "violat[ed] a condition of pre-release": "refusing to attend a mandatory program" and being "presen[t] in an unauthorized area."
"Can you believe that?" Williams asks. "I get cited for bleeding to death on the sidewalk."
As it turned out, few people have ever paid a steeper price for running late.
By the time Williams crossed Western Avenue on the city's North Side, "I was almost there," he recalls. "I didn't see anything coming. I heard it and then I felt it."
Pop! Pop! Pop!
What he heard -- and then felt -- were gunshots. He's not sure how many there were, exactly: He didn't have time to sort it out.
"All of a sudden, I could feel the bullets rip into my back and I felt this burning sensation move through my body," Williams says. "The pain was horrible laying there on the sidewalk. The worst feeling was that I knew I was probably as good as dead."
Williams, 48, didn't die that night. But sometimes he wishes he had.
"After what I endured," he explains, "there were nights that I would have preferred death to what I was actually going through."
Williams was rushed to nearby Allegheny General Hospital, though he remembers little of that night, where he was listed in critical condition. In the days that followed, his only thought -- when he was coherent enough to have one -- was to simply stay alive. It certainly never occurred to him that he might be thrown in jail as a result of the shooting. After all, he was the victim.
But after Williams was hospitalized for 46 days, records show, state prison guards took him back to prison in handcuffs. He spent the rest of his convalescence in two state prisons: SCI-Pittsburgh, the now-shuttered North Side facility also known as Western Penitentiary, and SCI-Coal Township. There he recovered from multiple gunshot wounds, alternating stints in a prison infirmary with stretches of time in a Restricted Housing Unit -- better known as solitary confinement.
Williams' offense: being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- literally. According to a discipline report made out by prison authorities after the shooting, Williams had "violat[ed] a condition of pre-release": "refusing to attend a mandatory program" and being "presen[t] in an unauthorized area."
"Can you believe that?" Williams asks. "I get cited for bleeding to death on the sidewalk."