A month before graduating from St. Thomas University in Minnesota, Paul Rousseau was accidentally shot in the head by his roommate and best friend, Mark.
Miraculously, she survived the shooting and waited, bleeding profusely and delirious, for two hours while Mark lied to university authorities and refused to call an ambulance, fearing the consequences for his own future.
The couple have not spoken since, although Paul has declined to press charges.
But in his new book Friendly Fire: A Fractured MemoryHe has written a heartbreaking letter to Mark for the first time, trying to make sense not only of what happened that night, but also how a friendship that had meant so much to him could be so irrevocably shattered in one brief moment.
Miraculously, Paul survived the shooting and waited, bleeding profusely and delirious, for two hours before Mark called an ambulance.
Mark had acquired five guns, legally and with permits, even though St. Thomas had a zero-tolerance gun ban on campus.
‘Dear Mark,
“What the hell. That was weird, man,” he begins, going on to imagine what Mark could have been doing in his room to cause the gun to accidentally go off, crashing through two walls before hitting Paul’s skull, leaving him permanently disabled.
—You were what? Grooming yourself? Alone in your room? Trying something out?
“Look how cool I am, so big and strong, breaking the rules. I have to clean my clothes and put them to bed. You never needed any of that. You were funny and dear and charming, and everyone was drawn to you.”
Over the course of their three-year friendship, Mark had acquired a total of five guns, legally and with permits. Paul didn’t care. The pair were inseparable. “We’re the best of friends,” he writes. “I love him.”
But That night in April 2017 was to change the course of both of their lives.
‘They had been chatting and laughing on the couch, with the TV on, when Mark returned to his room (Paul thought to take a nap).
A few moments later, Mark bent down to pick something up from the floor: “A piece of paper, maybe, a dead battery or a guitar pick, I don’t know. I don’t hear it. I don’t see it. But something’s coming towards me through the wall.”
Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir is published by HarperCollins
Since the shooting, Paul’s days have been filled with painful surgeries and generally coming to terms with life with a traumatic brain injury.
She describes the feeling as if “you’ve been dunked into a pool of cough syrup, soaked in thick liquid while wearing several layers of thread.”
As she struggled to her feet, Mark came running out of her room. “I didn’t know it was loaded!” he said, standing, holding the gun in his limp hand.
Panicking, he stalled for time, told Paul to take a shower, and then laid him down on the bed before disappearing; Paul later discovered that he had gone to hide his firearms in his car: the pistol he had just fired, a small-caliber rifle, a second pistol, and an AR-15, “along with enough ammunition to equip a small militia.”
Over the next two hours, as Paul drifted in and out of consciousness, the university’s public safety officer arrived to check on the fire alarm. The bullet had set it off by going through the wall.
Mark lied, saying he was smoking and then, when questioned again, said he had burned something in the oven. When she saw blood on the floor, he said it was the result of a “really bad nose bleed.”
Later, Paul woke up to hear voices from the other room: Mark had called his friends Keith and Rachel, who were begging him to call an ambulance.
“I will, I will,” Mark said. “Just wait. Give me another second…”
Paul now knows that it took Mark two hours to call the paramedics. That night was the last time they spoke, although they have seen each other once since, via video call while he was fighting an insurance claim.
“I started hyperventilating, looking around like crazy, sitting on my hands, rocking back and forth, making little movements that a trapped animal would make. All of this, and you weren’t even physically in the room. Afterwards, my attorney, angry on my behalf, told the judge that I needed a fair warning the next time you were around. A trigger warning, so to speak.”
Paul says he forgave Mark the moment he was shot, but that was the last day the two spoke.
But he says he still sees his old friend in his dreams all the time.
‘The dreams are almost identical… every time we get close, a sickly, grainy aura fills the space around us; the air can sense the tension, the horror of what happened, though it’s never explicitly stated. I don’t think the universe wants us to be at such a distance ever again. In those scenarios, we might very well bring about the apocalypse.’
She added: “I know you’re sorry. We don’t have to apologize anymore. I forgave you the moment it happened.”
Since the shooting, Paul’s days have been filled with painful surgeries, a lengthy and “dehumanizing” personal injury claim, lots of therapy and generally adjusting to life with a traumatic brain injury.
Mark graduated from college, after being briefly expelled, despite the school’s zero-tolerance ban on guns on campus.
“It’s hard not to speculate,” Paul writes. “It’s possible that Mark appealed the expulsion and won. He has money. He could have hired a lawyer to challenge the university’s decision. This happens all the time.”
And to Mark she writes: “If all the good memories I have of us are a lake, on April 7th a tank of toxic waste was dumped into it, polluting the entire body of water. Maybe some things can be filtered out, but that lake is beyond redemption. Are you glad it’s not dead?”
Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir by Paul Rousseau is published by HarperCollins
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