"Geoff’s room," the cheerful young female voice says, answering the telephone.
In the background, laughter and music can be heard as the young lady tells Geoff the call is for him.
Fifteen minutes later, 19-year-old Geoffrey Brian Kennedy concludes his conversation with the caller — a stranger who has just interviewed him — by saying, "Today’s a good day."
It all sounds so normal.
But there have been precious few good days, and no normal ones at all, for Geoff Kennedy lately. Not since around 3 p.m. on April 25, the day he was shot in the back trying to flee an armed assailant on one of the twisting byways behind Back Street in downtown Charlotte Amalie and was left paralyzed from the waist down.
According to Kennedy, people came running "within 30 seconds or a minute" when they heard the shot. He remembers a police officer on the scene and the ambulance that took him to the Roy L. Schneider Hospital emergency room. From there he was airlifted to Puerto Rico’s University Hospital, where he spent six days in intensive care and 18 more in intermediate care.
On Monday, May 22, he was transferred to the third floor of Health South, a rehabilitation facility in San Juan, where he will spend another six weeks in therapy. Then he will go home to Tortola, where he lives with his parents, the managing partners of a small hotel.
But life will never be the same for Geoff Kennedy there, or anywhere. He and his parents have been told by his doctors that he will never walk again — and for now, at least, they have no choice but to believe it is so.
Normal for Kennedy was a life on the go. He was into "mountain biking, horseback riding, sailing. He was the Caribbean junior mountain bike champion in 1996 — the B.V.I. has a very good team," his mother, Pam Kennedy, says.
"He was offered a pro surfing contract about three days before he was shot," his father, Terry Kennedy, adds. "He was working on his captain’s license. He’d been helping people bring boats down from the States. He had a chance to sail to the Canary Islands and bring a boat over from South Africa."
Meantime, it was his plan to get his General Equivalency Diploma, so that he could go to college in the States. On the morning of April 25, he traveled from Tortola to St. Thomas to make the arrangements to take the GED test. He planned to go to St. John at the end of the day to meet his friend Lesley Castle, who was celebrating her 18th birthday, and join her for dinner at Asolare, the restaurant where she has a part-time job.
"He was best friends with Lesley," her mother, Mary Bartolucci, explains. "Then, briefly, there was a romance, and then they went back to being very good friends."
Bartolucci, who has been calling radio talk shows and writing to print media about her concerns regarding the reporting and investigation of the shooting, says Kennedy "always had a lot of energy. He was a good athlete and very much into hiking. . . He has a personality that draws people to him. He’s just a really good kid, very much into life."
As is often the case with breaking crime news, initial media reports and talk on the streets in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s shooting included misinformation and speculation that proved unfounded. One account had him shot by someone who had tried to sell him some rings. There were rumors that it was a drug deal gone bad.
In the aftermath of last week’s fatal shooting of 18-year-old Jason Carroll on Main Street, there was talk that the triggerman in that crime might have been the same one who shot Kennedy. The man charged in that killing is 24 years of age. Kennedy says he was shot by "a skinny kid about 16."
When Kennedy got to the Adult Education offices on Garden Street that afternoon, the person he needed to see wasn’t there and he was told to come back later. So, he took a walk — along Back Street for a couple of blocks and then up Snegle Gade (Snail Street) by Cuzzin’s Restaurant, back by the old Safari Lounge.
"I didn’t have anything to do," Kennedy recalls. "I was just walking up the hill to see if there was anything up there, a bar to chill out maybe. I saw the kid. At the wall on the right side his bicycle was leaning. I was walking by, maybe two, three feet away."
What happened, then, he says, was this: "The kid was trying to sell me coke. He had a fanny pack, or a belly pack, with pot and little dime bags of coke. He had this bag waving at me, and in a split second the gun came out and he pointed it at my head. He said ‘Give me your money.’" The youth hit him on the head with the gun. "I jumped him," Kennedy says. "I don’t know if it was just the wrong thing to do. Maybe I should have just given him my wallet, but he might have just shot me anyway."
Then, as he tried to get away, the assailant pulled the trigger of what Kennedy later described as a small automatic handgun that was a brassy color, not black or silver. The bullet struck Kennedy between the shoulder blades, between the 9th and 10th vertebrae, and lodged very close to the aorta, the main artery pumping blood from the heart. According to police accounts, a .38 caliber casing and the brown bicycle were found at the scene of the shooting.
Five weeks later, police have yet to interview Kennedy, other than the information that was taken at the emergency room, and no suspect has been charged in connection with the case. Kennedy saw his assailant at close range and has a vivid recollection of what occurred.
Terry Kennedy says he received a telephone call while he was in Puerto Rico "a couple of weeks ago" from an officer on St. Thomas wanting to know how Geoff was doing and when "someone from the Police Department could come over to show him some photographs. But they’ve never called back or come over to see him."
Meantime, Kennedy’s parents and Bartolucci have been trying without success to get the police to release his wallet, which contained about $200, his passport and backpack. Since Bartolucci is on St. John, she has been trying to serve as liaison on behalf of the Kennedys. The latest word on the matter, last week, was "they won’t give them without a notarized statement from us," Terry Kennedy said.
For Geoff Kennedy, normal days now consist of physical therapy, occupational therapy, recreational therapy and emotional therapy sessions at Health South. "The people are amazing here," he says of the staff. "The doctors told me the outcome, and I’m just keeping the faith, praying to God and keeping everything positive. I’m trying to give a hundred percent and get out."
Building upper body strength by lifting weights is a part of the regimen. So are "learning to get in and out of bed, go to the bathroom, take showers, dress and undress, all the things we take for granted," his mother says. And so is the psychotherapy. "My therapist helps me out a lot," Kennedy says. "She doesn’t force me to think anything; she just helps me deal with it all."
He heard about the Carroll killing last week, two short blocks from where he was shot. "I don’t know what’s going on in St. Thomas," he says. "If the cops can’t handle it, they’ve got to get some help from somewhere. On Tortola, they have roadblocks now on Friday nights, stopping the kids that are cruising around.
"I used to go over there [to St. Thomas] and party all night and go from bar to bar at 3 in the morning in Red Hook and see people who looked shady but I never really gave it any thought. I can’t believe I got shot in the middle of the day."
He’s unsure what he would do if he could confront his assailant: "I don’t know. He did it spitefully. He doesn’t have anything better to do than rob people and shoot them in t
he back? I’m angry. I would get him back. That’s the point I feel now."
The standard greetings of "how ya doing?" or "how’s it going?" don’t bother him. "I’m still here, and I’m talking to you," he says. "Normally I’m happy; actually I’m real happy when I’m doing things. I’m sad and get angry with the guy who shot me when I’m just sitting and thinking." He adds, "I get a lot of ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I feel for you’ type of things."
But Friday, the "today" at the start of this article, as he said, was "a good day."
For one thing, five female friends came over from Tortola to visit for the weekend with a buddy of his due in on Saturday too. For another, he says, "I got my pass for the first time." That meant that with an aide accompanying him he could leave the third floor of the therapy center, leave the whole building, and go out into the normal world.
"I went to the Burger King," he says with satisfaction. "It felt good to feel the sun and the wind. The hairs on my arms felt real weird."
Tuesday: Family, friends and frustrations, and Lesley Castle’s indelible memories of finding her friend in the emergency room.
