Bullets, Badges, and Broken Promises

[Supply Side Jesus]

There are five of them, with eight wheels between them, countless pills and shots, and many catheters. Their injuries span decades. Most resulted from bullets

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As the City of Atlanta has turned its back, they say, the wheelchairs that belong to Biello and Phinney have gone unrepaired for months. Oxygen tanks have been withheld. Medication to prevent Cocciolone’s crippling migraines has been stopped. Surgeries have been delayed. The city has refused to pay for Buffington’s therapeutic support hose, the kind paraplegics wear to aid circulation in their legs. And Williams can’t use the air conditioner in the used van the city provided him, because its motor and battery weren’t intended to power a van of its size, much less the lift he has to use.

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My familiarity with this string of petty indignities began one recent sunny Friday, in Cocciolone’s living room in Lilburn.

The first thing she wants to know is, “Can I get in trouble?”

Her voice is uncertain. She pauses frequently, obviously searching for what the next word should be. This is the result of brain damage she suffered when a man named Gregory Paul Lawler killed her fellow Atlanta police officer, John “Rick” Sowa, in 1997, and then turned the gun on her.

The gunman had already shot her, obliterating her hip, and she was on the ground trying to speak into her radio to ask for help when he stood over her and pressed the end of his rifle to her forehead. She managed to turn her head at the last moment. The move probably saved her life, but it sent the bullet tearing through the portion of her brain that governs speech and memory. Unfortunately, it didn’t interfere with the part of her brain that churns out nightmares in which she tries to shoot Lawler again and again.

“My bullets just won’t hit the target. It’s not working,” she recounts through tears. “I’m just not good enough.”

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The story of Biello’s wheelchair begins April 15, 1987.

“There was a robbery at a Provino’s on Wieuca Road,” says Biello. “When I got there, a guy had a gun to the receptionist’s head and he had the manager by the throat. I rushed him. We wrestled. He shot me three times and I collapsed.”

Then, “he straddled me and shot me,” he says. “I had damage to my spinal chord, my vocal chords, and I was shot in a lung. Blood was all over the place. People were screaming.”

He has been paralyzed from the neck down, with some use of his right arm, ever since.

But he’s made good use of the time. He served as a Cherokee County commissioner for 14 years. He has a wife, two children and four grandchildren.

Biello takes medication four times a day to alleviate constant pain. Someone has to catheterize him seven to 10 times daily so he can urinate. Someone has to feed him, and someone must “cough” him.

In the past, the city paid a nurse to do that.

When his wheelchair’s leg support broke, he told the city that he needed the chair repaired or replaced, but Walker put him off for five months, he says, while his atrophied legs whipped along in the vicinity of where the support used to be. One day, going through a doorway, he heard a loud snap and turned to see his leg bent at a peculiar angle.

“The day I broke my leg was the day they finally approved my wheelchair being fixed,” he says.
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