In the seconds after seeing the flash from the gun, Josh Lucier thought about what he might miss if his life ended right then and there, standing not far from home plate, in the middle of “Nowhere, Ohio.”
He was scared he’d never talk to his parents or girlfriend again. His mind racing, he turned and ran and felt the third bullet pierce his body — two in his hip, one in his shoulder.
When he reached the steps of the team bus, he told his coach to call 911 and sat down, checking his breath, making sure he wasn’t losing too much blood, asking himself if he knew what day it was, to see if he was thinking clearly.
Lucier, a Haslett High School alum and pitcher then for Olivet College’s baseball team, had gone back to the field after a game at Muskingum University on March 17, 2023, to look for his sweatshirt. As he left the dugout and reached the sidewalk behind home plate, a man approached him, didn’t say a word, and, from a couple feet away, pulled a 22-caliber revolver out of the front pocket of his shirt and fired twice, then a third time as Lucier ran.
Lucier lived to tell the story — one of eventual triumph and lingering trauma.
More than three years later, Lucier thinks about that day in New Concord, Ohio, often — about what might have happened if one of the bullets had hit a vital organ. He’s reminded of it when he throws — a right-handed pitcher with a shoulder that’ll never feel the same — and when he’s in public and sees someone or something that looks out of place.
The one place he’s been comfortable since being shot on a baseball field?
Same place.
“The baseball field is kind of like my sanctuary, where I just get to be myself and be around my teammates and my brothers, and kind of be there for them,” said Lucier, who returned to pitching just three weeks after being shot.
Lucier’s playing career ended this month — as the bullpen closer for a Cleary University team that finished with a program-record 31 wins, including its first wins ever in the Wolverine-Hoosier Athletic Conference tournament. Lucier transferred to Cleary from Olivet following that 2023 season.
“I finally had a fully healthy year,” Lucier said of his final go this spring. “I was the closer, which, my goal my whole career was to be a closer. … And that was the first team I’ve been on that’s been over .500 since I was like 12 years old. It sucks that it’s over, but it’s also kind of peaceful for me. I finally had a good year after having a rough go at it.”
Lucier isn’t done with baseball. He intends to coach at some level. He’s been helping out his old high school program at Haslett in his spare time the past three seasons. It’s still his sanctuary, even if he doesn’t need it so intensely anymore.
‘Every parent’s worst nightmare’
Lucier isn’t the only one with scars from that day three years ago. His parents and girlfriend have gone through it with him — beginning with a frightening few hours of uncertainty.
“It was terrifying. Every parent’s worst nightmare,” Josh’s mother, Sara, said. “Especially not being able to be there for him and be able to talk to the doctors. It’s our job to protect our kids, and when you’re not able to, it’s scary.”
Sara was on a flight back from Seattle when she got the news. She’d been watching the stream of the game on the airplane. Josh had pitched the final two innings, closing out Olivet’s first win of the season. Sara was celebrating with a friend sitting next to her. Then, about 10 minutes later, she received two calls from Olivet’s coach. She didn’t answer, because she was on a plane. But when he emailed her asking her to call him, she went to the bathroom and did so.
“He just told me that Josh was shot. He didn’t know how it happened. He didn’t know if he was going to be OK, and he said he’ll update me as soon as he knows anything,” Sara recalled. “He just said the ambulance was on the way.”
Helplessly, she began texting with her husband Jay, Josh’s father, who was back home. Jay told Sara to skip her connecting flight from Detroit to Lansing. He’d pick her up there and they’d head to Ohio together.
“I’ve probably never heard my wife’s voice like that before,” Jay said.
Jay also called Josh’s girlfriend, Skylar Coules, with what little information he had. She remembers freaking out, “Because what else are you going to do?”
Skylar had some healthcare experience in school at the time and knew the problems of a bullet wound could cause, depending on where it hit.
“At that point, Josh lost his phone and didn’t have it, so I couldn’t get ahold of him,” Skylar said. “I didn’t have any of his teammates’ numbers, so I was just out in the cold.”
The first good news came when Josh was able to reach Skylar and his parents from his coach’s phone in the hospital.
“He said, ‘Dad, how you doing?’” Jay recalled.
“‘Josh?! How are you doing?!” Jay replied.
“I just remember he was happier than he should have been for just being shot,” Skylar said. “I was like, ‘Alright, he’s good.’ ”
The relief really came when Josh’s parents walked into his hospital room and he and his coach were watching golf on television.
Finally some answers
Josh wanted to get back to his teammates and baseball as soon as he could. He was told that, other than pitching through scar tissue in his shoulder, there was no problem with him returning to the mound.
So, a couple weeks later, he went to a practice at Haslett High School and tossed the ball around to see how it felt. And, a week after that, he returned to Olivet’s team.
“I’ve never felt 100% since, but that’s just kind of the nature of the injury — getting shot in your right shoulder and you’re a right-handed pitcher. I mean, it’s never going to be the same.”
He pitched nearly two innings in a game on April 15, 2023, at Hope College, and another inning on April 21 against Adrian, and one more on April 30 against Kalamazoo.
It was important to him that he get back to the team. They were his guys.
“That’s where all my best friends were,” Josh said. And they, too, had experienced something traumatic, seeing Josh sprinting to the bus and go to the ground.
“We were all freaking out,” Josh’s friend and former Olivet teammate Keegan Kuha said. “Other coaches were telling us all to get down. Nobody knows what’s going on. We’re all terrified. I think the part that’s stuck with me the most is, that five-minute period of not knowing if our teammate and our brother (is OK). Your mind’s racing. You’re thinking of the worst possible outcomes. That period of not knowing what’s happening — like, is Josh OK? Are we OK? Are we being targeted for anything?’ That’s probably the scariest five, 10 minutes of my life.”
They, themselves, weren’t being targeted, per se, though they — and Josh — wouldn’t know that for certain for some time. Not until the sentencing of 29-year-old Franklin Grayson last November in Muskingum County. Grayson pleaded guilty in October to attempted murder, among other charges, and was sentenced to 26 years in prison. Grayson’s beef was with Olivet, his alma mater, according to reports. He looked up the baseball schedule, flew up from Jacksonville, Florida, rented a truck and purchased a bike and a gun, the Muskingum County prosecutor said. Josh Lucier just happened to be the person from Olivet in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Grayson was originally found incompetent to stand trial in 2023, but that changed after treatment.
“The investigation showed that Grayson wished to lash out at Olivet College, and that he also developed a detailed plan to commit and then get away with his crime,” Muskingum County Prosecutor Ron Welch said in announcing that Grayson had admitted guilt.
“We couldn’t find out any information. Like none of the detectives or the police, they wouldn’t tell us anything,” Jay said. “I thought he was targeted — until we went to court. I was like, I can’t believe that I was on one track, and then I would talk to Josh and say, ‘What did you do?’ … We’re going back and trying to figure out what’s going on. And then after getting out of that courtroom, I just felt like, ‘Holy shit, I was so wrong about things.’ ”
That lack of knowing added to Josh living in fear.
“There was a little bit (of time) there where I didn’t think we were going to go out ever again as a couple,” Skylar said.
They sold their tickets to a concert that summer in Detroit. Josh would text her at times, saying ‘Hey, this person was looking at me funny and it made me nervous and I had to leave.’“
And then, a year later, in his first game pitching for Cleary, he realized he needed some help.
Regaining control
Josh left Olivet after his sophomore year in 2023. He didn’t want to. He loved his time at Olivet up until then. Olivet was the only baseball program that had shown interest in him coming out of Haslett. He loved his teammates. The school, he thought, handled his situation poorly in terms of helping him get through the remainder of the semester after the shooting. He’s suing what’s now the University of Olivet, as well as Muskingum University, for “negligence and breach of each university’s obligation to protect student-athletes prior to, during and after a scheduled athletic event,” according to the complaint filed in Eaton County.
Josh’s fresh start at Cleary University in Howell lasted only until his first game on the mound. The umpires that day were the same crew as the day he was shot at Muskingum. He didn’t realize it until he went out to pitch a second inning and, as he was warming up, they came up to talk to him, saying they were glad to see him back on the field and so forth.
“Then I kind of just like zoned out and I think I walked the next three (batters),” Josh said. “I couldn’t throw a strike. And then, when I got pulled like, I had a panic attack. I was crying, but I wasn’t sobbing. Tears were just coming down my face, but I wasn’t out of breath or anything. It just was kind of weird. I’d never felt anything like that before. I’d never had a panic attack. I still think that’s my only one I’ve ever had.”
For the first time, Josh realized he couldn’t control what he was feeling, even on the baseball field. His mother had been trying to get him to seek counseling. He’d always pushed back. “I don’t need to go talk to anybody about my feelings,” he’d say.
Now he knew he did. His mother presented the idea of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, better known as EMDR, which targets specific traumas.
“I noticed a huge difference,” Sara said. “It really helped him.”
“If something triggers me out in public, the initial reaction is about the same,” Josh said. “But one of the things I learned is just to, like, it might sound dumb, but look at different things and realize what they are. Like, ‘Oh, there’s a tan chair,’ or ‘a black couch.’ And just take in my environment, ground myself in that environment. Not trying to think about what could happen.”
Life after that was not without challenges. Josh missed the 2025 season after having Tommy John surgery to repair a torn ligament in his elbow, suffered a year earlier. It was then that he first got into helping the coaching staff at Haslett.
But his life away from baseball is normal again in ways Skyler worried it never would be again.
“It was like I met a very confident and outgoing guy and then saw somebody take that away from him,” she said. “Watching him build it back up, it’s hard and rewarding at the same time.”
“I’m just a lot more appreciative of my family and the other sides of life,” Josh said. “I can just slow down a little bit. I value that, like the social part of life a lot more, and appreciating the people around you, and not just your accomplishments in school and baseball, or the materialistic things.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Baseball remains Josh Lucier’s sanctuary after being shot on a baseball field three years ago
Reporting by Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
