A Lucky Shot at Life: Two Years Later

Sept. 1, 2009 -- As a young, single mom who graduated from high school in June, Jessica Forsyth knows the time will come when she will have to tell her 2-year-old daughter, Gabriella, what happened to daddy.

She plans to break the news in stages.

"When she's older and she's like, 'Mommy, everyone else has ... every one of my friends has daddies, where's my daddy?' I'm gonna tell her that your daddy was sick and he's in heaven now," Forsyth said from her hometown, Midland, Mich.

"And then when she's old enough to actually understand, then I'll tell her the whole story."

The whole story began two years ago, when Forsyth, then 17, nearly died after her boyfriend, 17-year-old David Turner, shot her multiple times at H.H. Dow High School in Midland, where Forsyth was a student.

Police responding to the scene found Forsyth barely conscious and Turner dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

At the time Forsyth was four months pregnant with Turner's baby. She didn't know. She wouldn't find out until surgeons treating her gunshot wounds told her.

Just as shocking was the doctors' report of how Forsyth had escaped death. As a girl, she had broken her collarbone twice. The second time, doctors implanted a 6-inch titanium plate to hold the bone together.

That plate stopped what might have been a lethal bullet.

Lucky Shot: A Romance Turned Sour

Police Officer Chad Schieber was the first to respond to the shooting at Dow High on March 7, 2007. Forsyth had been shot at close range. Her mother, Rhonda Poston, who witnessed the shooting from her car, held Forsyth's body, trying to simultaneously stop the blood and soothe her daughter.

Poston held her hand over the smoke that was coming out of Forsyth's back, where a bullet had punctured her skin. Forsyth repeatedly screamed to her mom, "I don't want to die. I don't want to die."