Shot, Paralyzed — & Not Giving Up

Jayden Ortiz spent one morning this week practicing multiplication and rounding decimals with his math tutor — and practicing getting from his bed to his wheelchair to his desk and back with his physical therapist.

The 12-year-old Hill native doesn’t spend his days at Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy or his nights at his family’s Howard Avenue home, as he did last year. Instead, he has spent the past three months at a rehabilitation center, steadily recovering after being hit in the chest by a stray bullet while on vacation in Puerto Rico.

Jayden’s new — but temporary — home away from home since late July has been the Hospital for Special Care in New Britain.

His dad, Carlos, visits him every afternoon and evening in between getting off of work in Waterbury and returning to the Ortiz family’s home on Howard Avenue near Second Street in the Hill.

On July 24, while on vacation in Coamo, Puerto Rico with his grandparents and three cousins, Jayden was caught in a random, violent crossfire on a late night gas station stop.

Carlos was in New Haven at the time but pieced together the story of what happened from talking with his son, his parents, and the detectives in Puerto Rico assigned to the case.

He and Jayden said that Jayden was helping his grandfather fill up their car’s tank with gas when people in one adjacent car started shooting at people in another adjacent car.

Jayden was hit in the chest, suffered a spinal injury, and is now paralyzed from the chest down.

“I didn’t know what was happening,” Jayden told the Independent this week. ​“I was knocked out, then I woke up on the floor. I couldn’t move or nothing. I thought it was a nightmare.”

“I just still don’t believe this,” Jayden’s father, Carlos, said with tear-filled eyes during an interview at his Howard Avenue home. His parents own the home, which both he and, two decades later later, Jayden, grew up.

“I just want to see my son home.”

Jayden said he spends most mornings doing physical therapy for an hour, practicing getting out of bed, getting comfortable in his new wheelchair, lifting weights on a rickshaw weight machine, and generally building upper body strength. He then spends an hour at school, working with tutors on material he would otherwise be learning in sixth grade at Roberto Clemente. The afternoons, he said, he usually has to himself.

“I think I made a lot of progress,” Jayden said about physical therapy so far. ​“In the beginning, I could barely move.”

He couldn’t even pick up a piece of bacon, Carlos said. ​“Compared to three months ago, he’s done a whole 360. It’s amazing how he recuperated so fast.”

Carlos said he hopes to have his son home by Dec. 20, a few days before Christmas.

In the meantime, he’s trying to figure out a way to retrofit at least the first floor of their early 20th century three-family home to be wheelchair accessible. That means installing a new ramp, widening the front door entrance, and rebuilding the bathroom. And that’s not to mention figuring out how to pay the steadily mounting medical bills.

Carlos and Jayden have already raised over $5,600 through a GoFundMe campaign that the older Ortiz set up soon after the shooting took place. Both father and son thanked the Hill community for rallying around them, donating money and sitting with them to pray, especially after WTNH first reported on the shooting in late July.

“I just want to inspire and to keep pushing,” Jayden said.

“Nothing is gonna stop him from doing what he wants,” Carlos added. His son is determined to make it back to the Hill, to return to his home community, to persevere through this tragedy.

“I Just Lost It”

Sitting on his parents’ couch, his right hand shaking with nerves, in front of a windowsill topped by bright orange Halloween decorations, Carlos recounted what happened that led to Jayden getting shot.

His son had traveled to Coamo, Puerto Rico in early July with his grandparents and three cousins, he said, on an annual vacation to the island Carlos’s parents made that Jayden had yet to go on.

“I was always hesitant to let him go,” he said. Jayden’s mom has been incarcerated at York Correctional Institution for most of Jayden’s life, he said, and he and his son are very close.

But the father assented, choosing to stay behind in New Haven to keep his regular work hours at the Waterbury-based Plasma Coatings, for which Car;ps travels throughout New England resurfacing rolling machines at paper mills.

Jayden and his grandparents and cousins left for Puerto Rico in early July and were scheduled to come home on Aug. 4, Carlos said.

Their visit happened to coincide with the tail end of months of public protests against government corruption that would culminate on July 24 with the resignation of Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló.

That same night, Jayden and his cousins and grandparents drove to a gas station to fill up their car’s tank and pick up some spare fuel in case they needed to leave town in a hurry because of the protests, Carlos said.

At that gas station in Coamo, Jayden got out of the car to help his grandfather with the pump. While the two were filling up the tank, one car pulled up next to their car. A second one pulled up right behind the first.

“The people in the back started shooting at the people in the front,” Carlos said.

From what he knows now, Carlos said, there was likely some beef between the people in the two cars related to an attack one had previously made on the other’s family.

He said he still doesn’t know if any of the people involved in the shooting were apprehended.

In the midst of that gunfire, Jayden was hit in the chest. Carlos said the bullet exited diagonally through his son’s back, injuring his spine.

The next few hours and days, Carlos said, still haunt him.

His parents frantically called his cellphone from Puerto Rico, but he was asleep at the time and his phone was on vibrate.

He woke up only when his brother pounded on the Howard Avenue home’s front door and told him Jayden had been shot.

“I said, ​‘What Jayden?’” Ortiz remembered, reliving his initial disbelief. When the news sunk in, ​“I lost it,” he said. ​“I just lost it.”

The next morning, he was on a flight to Puerto Rico. He went straight to the Coamo hospital to visit his son and was appalled by what he saw as insufficient capacity to treat such a serious injury.

“I had to get my son out of there,” he said.

Fortunately, Carlos said, his insurance through work covered the cost of flying him and his son back to Connecticut the next day so that his son could be treated at Yale New Haven Hospital.

On the Monday after Jayden had been shot, he said, he underwent surgey. ​“They stabilized him, and put in screws and rods.”

For the past three months, his son has been doing in-patient rehabilitation at the New Britain clinic.

“Every day my son gets better and better,” Carlos said. But that improving physical and emotional strength took a while to achieve. At first, he said, Jayden didn’t want to talk to anyone, including his family. He shut himself out. ​“He was just mean,” Carlos said.

Now, the two are putting their lives back together. Carlos has set up the GoFundMe page. He said a neighbor on Sea Street might be donating her wheelchair ramp to the family. And friends and family have continued to show support through donations and prayers and anything else they can give.

“There’s been some tough nights,” he added.

He said his parents apologize to him every night before they go to bed, but he doesn’t hold the shooting against them. It wasn’t their fault, he said. Jayden being shot was an entirely random, tragic outcome of a dispute completely unrelated to his family.

For his part, Jayden said that, even when he returns home to Howard Avenue, he wants to keep telling his story to anyone who will listen. About how he was shot. About how severely he was injured. About how he is refusing to let this tragedy derail his life. He said he made two friends at the New Britain rehab center, one named Al and one named Dave, who had been through similar situations. They’d been shot, and paralyzed, and spent years at the clinic. ​“They’re home now,” he said. ​“I think it’s amazing what they went through.”

“I want to return the favor of” what they did for me, he continued, ​“and I want to share my story with other people and inspire.”

Go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/jaydenstrong to donate to Jayden Ortiz’s GoFundMe campaign.