Doctors tell Prodeo Patria that the pain throbbing near the bullet lodged in his side will fade away. But the memory of a terror-filled night when he was one of 70 people shot isn’t likely to leave him.
The 14 year-old Overland High School student sat with his mother, father and another couple at the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” when James Eagan Holmes allegedly threw a gas cannister and started shooting.
“My dad told me to duck down, while we were ducking down it was hard to breathe because of the gas,” he said from his hospital bed at University Hospital on Friday. “I just thought I wasn’t going to make it, but I was kind of calm.”
As bullets whizzed through the air and people screamed, the small group huddled between two rows of seats. When there was a break in the shooting, his father Anggiat Mora, 47, told his family to run for it.
They headed for the closest door on the front right side of the theater. It was dark in the theater, and the exit sign was clear and bright. Just before he reached the door a bullet struck the left side of his lower back.
“I thought it was just a scratch,” he said.
His mother, Rita Paulina, 45, was hit three times, once in the front of her lower left leg, once slightly above her left elbow, once below the same joint.
Patria made it through the door, then went back in to help his mother and father. Mora was picking his mother up, pulling her onto his back.
A stranger was helping another man whose leg was badly wounded, and he asked Patria to help him move the bleeding man out of the theater.
The teen braced the victim on one side while the other man held his other side and they helped him through the door and walked about 30 feet before stopping.
His father followed with Paulina on his back. Police cars were starting to arrive outside.
He didn’t tell his father he was wounded until he was sure the group was safe. “He said, “Look at my back dad, and I looked and see a hole,” Mora said.
Paulina was bleeding badly and saying nothing.
She is expected to undergo surgery on her crushed elbow sometime Saturday at Denver Health Medical Center. “I almost died,” she said, her left arm and leg swaddled in dressings. “It still hurts.”
Doctors have told Patria they will probably leave the bullet lodged where it is, at least for the time being.
When the ordeal was finished, Mora looked at his t-shirt. Four bullet holes were stitched across the front of the shirt, he said.
“You were very lucky,” his friend, Jerry Sahertian, 42, told him.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dpmcghee
