Of the eight people who were wounded and survived the mass shooting and fire Sunday at a Grand Blanc Township church, the first to get treatment at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital was a 6-year-old boy, said the doctor who cared for him.
“His mom walked him through the front door,” said Dr. Sanford Ross, the attending physician and assistant director of the emergency department, during a news conference Wednesday.
“He didn’t shed one tear. He walked into the emergency room stoic. Mom was a wreck, which, as a parent, I completely understand, and what I did was I looked at the wound, had an idea of what was going on. I comforted them both by telling him and mom, ‘You’re going to get through this. You’re going to be OK.’ “
The child was treated and released Sunday, said Dr. Chris Ash, a trauma and general surgeon who also serves as Henry Ford Genesys Hospital’s medical director of surgical services.
Others weren’t as fortunate. Four people who were at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during Sunday morning services when a gunman, who police have identified as Thomas Jacob Sanford, 40, of Burton, were killed. Sanford was killed by law enforcement officers in the church parking lot.
Three of the wounded remained hospitalized Wednesday afternoon in fair condition, said Henry Ford spokesperson Lauren Zakalik.
Sanford, Ash and Dr. Alan Janssen, the program director for the hospital’s residency program described what happened in the aftermath of the shooting, detailed how they prepared for the flood of patients they knew would come streaming into the hospital, and treating people who were suffering both physical wounds and emotional ones, too.
“This type of stuff doesn’t happen in Grand Blanc, Michigan,” Ash said.
‘There’s an active shooter in our church’
“It was a bright, sunny day and a Sunday morning,” Janssen said. “The combination of those two things usually means volumes are pretty low to start the day off. We didn’t have very many patients in the department.”
Then, the phone rang.
“It was … one of my residents,” Janssen said. “My resident was actually in the church and the resident said, ‘There’s an active shooter in our church.’ That was before EMS had been called. That was before anyone else knew about this. So, initially, we just started preparing the emergency department.”
Janssen and Ross called the surgery and anesthesia departments and told the staff to prepare for a mass casualty situation. They called Ash, too.
It took about 15 minutes for ambulances to arrive and for patients to come through the door, he said. The Henry Ford Genesys staff had just had mass casualty training “a month or two ago,” Ross said.
“You always say it could happen, but it probably will happen, which is the unfortunate thing,” he said.
Janssen said as they jumped into action, they worked methodically to triage patients who needed to be stabilized, with more critical wounds than others.
“That takes a lot of teamwork and leadership and thought process to make sure that you’re optimizing the care for what may or may not come in,” he said.
Two of the injured were their own: medical residents injured while attending church. More hospital employees were members of the church, their families sitting in the service when the gunfire started, the doctors said. Many showed up at the hospital on their days off to pitch in.
“Our resident whose kids were at church with his wife while he was operating with me that night at the hospital — his kids will never be the same,” Ash said.
Ash said gunshot wounds can be lethal, but it was the medical teams’ mission “to not let the gunshot kill them. That’s the honest to God truth. People try to die when they’re shot, often. That’s part of what doing trauma surgery is about: saving their lives.
‘Deeply personal to our community’
Ash said at least five hospital residents regularly attended services at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on McCandlish Road. Some of those residents jumped into action that day.
“Some of them acted with heroics to pull people out of the fire, and they shared that story with us when they came in for their own treatment,” he said. “This is deeply personal to our community.”
Ash said he hopes the attack will inspire people to “start having a little more grace and tolerance.”
“I’m from this community. I have lived 25-plus years here,” he said. “These are our people. … They are part of our extended family, and to see them go through this and their families go through this is just heartbreaking. I’ve told a lot of people, words cannot describe the feeling. We really shouldn’t have to go through this in any community.”
Contact Kristen Shamus and Lily Altavena: kshamus@freepress.com and laltavena@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Henry Ford physicians detail Grand Blanc Twp. shooting aftermath, race to care for victims
Reporting by Kristen Jordan Shamus and Lily Altavena, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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