Youngest Sniper Victim ID'd

Dec. 12, 2002 -- On the morning of Oct. 7, Lisa Brown got the kind of news every parent dreads: Her 13-year-old son, Iran, had been shot outside his school.

"I collapsed to the floor," she recalled. "I just started saying, 'Who could have done this to my baby?'"

Iran Brown was the youngest victim of the Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks, and one of only four who survived. Hit by a single bullet moments after his aunt dropped him off at the Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md., he was critically wounded, with potentially fatal damage to half a dozen different organs.

But through a series of smart medical decisions — and fortunate circumstances — doctors at a local clinic and at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington saved his life.

"It was a miracle and it is a miracle," said Jerome Brown, the boy's uncle. "We're just very pleased that God decided to save him."

In their first television interviews, Iran's family described the harrowing day to Primetime's Diane Sawyer, and revealed the boy's name (which is pronounced EYE-rehn) for the first time. The doctors and nurses who treated him described the difficult decisions they had to make, and his remarkable recovery.

The sniper shootings terrorized the area until Oct. 24, when police arrested former soldier John Allen Muhammad, 41, and 17-year-old John Lee Malvo in connection with the attacks. The two suspects face charges in multiple jurisdictions and, if convicted, could be sentenced to death.

A Single Shot

On the morning of Oct. 7, Iran was driven to school by his aunt, Tanya Brown, because he had been kicked off the school bus the week before for eating Twizzlers.

"He told me that he was on his last bite, and the bus driver asked him to come up to the front, and they gave him three days off the bus," said his aunt, a surgical nurse. Iran lives with his uncle and aunt because their home is closer to his school than his mother's apartment.

When they reached the school, Iran got out, tossed his book bag onto a low brick wall and turned around to watch his aunt drive off. Then, at 8:09 a.m., a single shot rang out.

"I heard a scream, and then he called my name," his aunt said. "I looked back in my rear-view mirror and I saw him on the ground with his head up, looking, you know, toward the car."

Tanya Brown backed the car up and pushed open the passenger door. Iran told her he had been shot, but astonishingly managed to struggle to his feet and get back into the car, holding his chest where the bullet had hit him.

Racing to the Clinic

Brown called 911 on her cell phone, but ignored the dispatcher's advice to stay where she was and wait for an ambulance. Instead, she trusted her nurse's instincts and headed straight for a community clinic a mile and a half from the school. "I knew that he needed help right away, and I knew that the Bowie Health Center was right around the corner."

As she drove, her foot on the gas and one hand on the horn, Brown noticed Iran growing pale and having difficulty breathing. "I knew that he was losing blood," she said. At one point, he looked up at his aunt and said, "Aunt Tanya, I love you."

Brown said she "freaked out a little bit," but told him she knew he was going to be OK.

Iran would later tell his mother that he kept repeating the same two phrases to himself as a kind of prayer: "Please don't let me die. I'm not ready to die."

‘Gunshot Wound!’

Iran and his aunt reached the Bowie clinic at 8:15, six minutes after the boy was shot. The clinic typically handles sore throats and broken bones, but when the call of "Gunshot wound!" went out, the staff sprang into action.

The clock was already ticking on what emergency room surgeons call "the golden hour" — the crucial first 60 minutes after a traumatic injury, during which they must stabilize the patient's vital signs like blood pressure and heart rate.

Iran was pale and sweating, and the clinic's ER staff knew he would not survive an ambulance ride to the trauma center at Prince George's Hospital Center, 13 miles away. When they cut away his clothing, all they saw was an entrance wound the size of a little finger, bubbling with blood. Realizing his lung was seriously injured and partially collapsed, they sedated him and inserted a breathing tube. An X-ray showed that the bullet had exploded inside Iran's chest, causing potentially fatal damage to several organs.

By 8:30, the Bowie clinic had used up all the donor blood they had on supply. They called in a helicopter from the Maryland State Police, and it arrived seven minutes later.

The helicopter lifted off from the Bowie clinic at 8:52 a.m. — carrying Iran but not his family members — and covered the 18 miles to the Children's National Medical Center, also known as Children's Hospital, in seven minutes. The Washington hospital's ER team of 18 surgeons, doctors and specialists was standing by, alerted by a beeper message with the barest information: A 13-year-old patient was on the way, with a gunshot wound to his chest.

Into the Operating Room

By 9:09 — an hour after he was shot — Iran was on his way to operating room No. 2 at the hospital, which specializes in traumatic injuries to children.

The chief of the hospital's surgical team, Martin Eichelberger, interrupted a nonemergency skin graft he was working on and rushed to OR No. 2. He called for quiet so he could hold a discussion with two key team members, nurse Diane Maria and anesthesiologist Ramesh Patel. With no time for a three-dimensional CAT scan, the three had to make crucial decisions based only on X-rays.

Not knowing which organ was the most likely to cause lethal injury, they had to take a gamble: whether to go in through the chest or the belly. After seeing blood in Iran's breathing tube, Eichelberger made the decision to open up the boy's chest.

"As they opened up the chest, it was just unbelievable," said surgeon Kurt Newman, referring to the damage done by the sniper's bullet. "It was like a bomb had gone off in there. This was meant to kill."

Newman had the job of cataloguing Iran's injuries. He said there was a blast injury through the boy's left lung, a hole in his diaphragm, a large linear tear in his stomach, and damage to his pancreas, spleen and liver. "I thought it was going to be pretty dicey," he told Primetime.

"There was a time when it was touch and go," agreed Maria.

Over the next six hours, the doctors established that Iran's kidneys seemed to be unharmed, then stitched up his liver and removed a small part of his pancreas.

With agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms waiting outside, the doctors were under pressure to find a fragment of the bullet as forensic evidence. Using an X-ray as a guide, they made an incision in Iran's chest and a thumbnail-sized bullet fragment "popped right out," Newman said.

They also allowed police photographers inside the OR so they could take pictures showing the bullet's trajectory into Iran's body. The bullet fragment would later lead investigators to a bullet casing found in the woods by the school, along with a tarot card with the words "I am God" written on it. It also confirmed that Iran was the eighth victim of the sniper attacks.

By 3 p.m., Iran's condition was stable enough for Eichelberger to talk to the boy's family waiting anxiously downstairs. He told them Iran had been through a serious stress but his body had responded well to their treatment. He warned them, however, "about the fact that things change on a rapid basis."

When Iran's mother finally saw him, he was in intensive care, hooked up to machines, with eight chest and side tubes.

"It was a nightmare. It was a total nightmare," she said. Despite the doctors' optimism and her own faith, she admits she worried that her son would not make it.

Rapid Recovery

But Iran made quick progress, recovering enough in five weeks that he was discharged from the hospital in mid-November, weeks earlier than expected. First lady Laura Bush met him today on a visit to the hospital, where he still goes for rehabilitation, and told him, "You look like you're doing great."

The full extent of Iran's injuries is still unknown, though. "Now we're in the waiting game of his recovery," his mother said.

The family knows that Iran will have to take medicine for the rest of his life because his spleen was removed. There is also a possibility that he will have respiratory problems because a portion of his lung was removed, and that he might be insulin-dependent because some of his pancreas was lost.

The family says it is not focusing on the two suspects, Muhammad and Malvo. "I can't spend any energy wishing their fate, because all of my energy has been focused on my son," said Lisa Brown.

They say they know they want to see the two men imprisoned for the rest of their lives, but have not decided whether they want them to get the death penalty.

"The Bible says that if you kill a person, then [you] should be killed, but I don't necessarily care whether they are killed or not," said Tanya Brown.

As for Iran, his mother says, the boy is aware of everything that happened to him — from the moment he was shot until the doctors at the Bowie clinic sedated him and cut his shirt away. "He told me move-by-move exactly what happened," she said.