15-year old still fighting for his life after being shot in stomach
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - A 15-year-old is fighting for his life two weeks after being shot in the stomach, and his mother still doesn’t know how it happened.
The only thing Andrea Gomez Sanchez knows for sure is that her son, Jose Baca, was hanging out with his friends in her apartment on Fordhaven road on April 24th.
Somehow, he was shot.
Gomez Sanchez said all she was told was that one of the boys had a gun which accidently went off and shot her son.
Now she’s wondering why a teenager has a gun in the first place and has questions about the response.
Baca’s family remembers him as happy, smiling, and having fun.
Now he’s fighting for his life in the hospital.
“We have not seen his eyes open or talked to him in two weeks,” Gomez Sanchez said. “It’s kind of hard for us because we’re used to phone calls everyday from him. Like ‘hey mom, how are you doing?’ or text messages, ‘good morning mom.’”
Gomez Sanchez was told it was an accident that happened when one of the kids was “cleaning the gun.”
Baca had three surgeries that night.
“They know he’s going to pull through, but it’s just where he’s going to be out when he does pull-through,” Gomez Sanchez said. Will he have problems with his brain? Will he have problems with his heart and lungs?”
After Baca was shot, she said her daughter and grandmother couldn’t get ahold of 911.
She said they started calling at 6pm.
“For 30 minutes we was trying and we never got through to them,” Gomez Sanchez said. “My son was just hemorrhaging on the ground because they kept sending us to their voice mail.”
MetroSafe tells a different story.
They said the first call came in from Gomez Sanchez’s daughter at 6:31pm, but the call got dropped.
911 called back at 6:35pm but got her voicemail. They were able to get in contact with Gomez Sanchez’s grandmother right after.
They said LMPD was dispatched at 6:38pm and got to the scene at 6:41pm.
EMS was dispatched at 6:43pm, and Fire at 6:46pm.
MetroSafe wants people to know to stay on the line when you call 911, because if you hang up, your call might be delayed when you try to call back..
“My daughter she’s 17 and my grandmother, she was there and she’s 81,” Gomez Sanchez said. “They didn’t know what to do for him. And I’m just on the phone screaming and yelling, ‘put towels on him! Put towels on him! Hold pressure!’ Because I couldn’t get there fast enough for him.”
Gomez Sanchez also has a problem with LMPD initially telling media he had non-life threatening injuries.
It’s caused her some grief because he’s been struggling for weeks.
“He was not recovering and doing okay,” she said.
An LMPD spokesperson told us they make that determination by talking to emergency room doctors.
As Gomez Sanchez ponders on the incident, one question keeps popping up.
“At 14-years old, why do you have a gun?” she asked.
She hopes it was all an accident because all the kids are friends. But the situation has her worried.
“If my 15-year old got shot in my kitchen, what says my 6-year old won’t be shot because another kid is carrying a gun?” Gomez Sanchez asked.
She said Baca woke up this week and they held hands. She says it’s good news because that means he knows who she is.
You can donate to his GoFundMe here.
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