Last January one of my closest friends – my Sigma Nu brother Andy Koroneos – accidentally shot himself in the face with his Rock Island Armory 1911 M1A1 .45 caliber pistol.

Perhaps you’ve seen him on campus. If you don’t know him, he’s the guy with the scars on his throat, chin, nose, forehead; he’s the guy who will gladly remind you how precious life is, and he’ll tell you that all people struggle, but he now knows in his heart that surrendering to hardship means failure. He’s the same guy I knew hours before he changed his life forever, albeit a little more, as he puts it, “calm” and “serious.”

Last week I sat down with Andy to talk about his experiences. He was eager to share his story for The Tiger.

“None of us remember hearing the sound of the shot,” Andy recollected while sitting on the edge of his dorm room bed. “In that kind of situation, everything blends together. I remember my head kicked back real hard, and I immediately jumped up and said ‘Ambulance! Ambulance!” He says he then collapsed into an upright-seated position on his couch, luckily preventing him from choking to death on his blood. “I was conscious the whole time. I never felt any pain. I guess the adrenaline took care of it.” Andy described a hazy, hectic scene: “I can’t remember any of the people or paramedics helping me, but I remember I realized how serious it was when I heard the helicopter.”

Andy was airlifted to Richmond’s VCU Medical Center, and he says the timing of emergency services (including several of Hampden-Sydney’s own) was crucial to his survival. “Fifteen minutes later and the helicopter wouldn’t have been able to fly in the weather.” At the hospital, doctors rushed Andy into an operating room where he was stabilized. He then had to wait an entire week before undergoing his first surgeries.

Understandably, Andy doesn’t know exactly how he shot himself. He drank very moderately that night because he was going to be studying the next day. He openly admitted to me, “The first mistake was bringing out the weapon.” The Rock Island .45, a weapon known for jamming, has an external hammer that initiates the firing of the bullet. Andy thinks that, while sitting on his couch, he accidentally hit the hammer on his knee, causing it to strike and fire the round through his face.

When Andy was recovering, his doctor joked with him, saying, “If you’re going to shoot yourself in the head, you did it exactly how it should be done.” The bullet entered between Andy’s jawbones on the bottom of his chin. It travelled through his mouth and behind his nose before exiting just above the right side of his left eyebrow. The sonic boom force of the bullet broke his jaw in six places; his teeth broke and scattered throughout his mouth; his tongue was split in half; the bone between his eyes was shattered; his left eye drooped down; his nose fell almost horizontal under his skin. But the bullet hadn’t destroyed his nose or eyes, and, more importantly, it hadn’t damaged his brain. It was, as Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon Dr. Robert Strauss called it, “The Perfect Shot.”

Andy developed a strong relationship with Dr. Strauss. Rightly so. Strauss, along with Otolaryngologist Dr. Nadir Ahmad, performed all of Andy’s surgeries. The doctors split time working on Andy for over fourteen hours during the first surgery. They fixed his jaw with metal plates. They installed what Andy called a “metal basket” between his eyes, allowing them to straighten his nose and reposition his eye by anchoring a ligament they spent three hours looking for. After three operations, the surgeons had done their work.

Now it was Andy’s turn. He had to help his body fight off infections. His main responsibility: get up and walk to work fluids out of his lungs. For a man covered in bandages, fed by a direct tube to his intestines, and weakened by painkillers, a 200-foot walk is a climbing Everest. Andy did it. Dr. Strauss said, “I have treated my share of gunshot wounds and facial fractures over the last twenty-five years (way more than I care to remember), and I have to admit that I do not think I have ever seen anyone recover so quickly and adapt to his or her condition so easily. He is quite remarkable.”

Andy credits his support system. One of his nurses, an ex-NYC undercover narcotics agent, kicked him into action. She told it to him straight: if he didn’t get up and start moving, he might get pneumonia and never leave the hospital. Without his closest friends and family, Andy says he wouldn’t have progressed as fast. They kept pushing him to work towards recovery. He said that wanting his relationships with loved ones to get back to normal caused him to work even harder.

“I had nothing but positive good vibes going through my mind, and that’s hard to do when you got a feeding tube dangling out, you can’t walk, you can’t talk, you can’t eat. That isn’t an easy thing to do for two months.”

I asked Andy what his message to people would be. He said, “What I’ve learned through this is, no matter how bad you think you’ve got it, if you have a good attitude and you desire to be back and to be who you are, if you never lose that desire you’re gonna heal. You can’t afford to get down on yourself, because it’s not going to accomplish anything for you.” At the same time Andy made it clear that he realizes how lucky he is “compared to the millions of people out there who have suffered much more horrid and debilitating things.”

Naturally, I had to ask my buddy what he now thinks about guns. Gun ownership is common among people on this campus, so Andy and his family and friends are not the only members of our community that have felt the pain of gun related accidents. Some of you have probably had a close call with your own guns. Never let your guard down. Don’t get too comfortable with them.
Andy’s take on guns is simple. “I believe everyone should have the right to own one. It’s a time and a place for them. People need to remember that.”

The pistol that Andy shot himself with was sold two weeks ago to an ex-cop. Andy never wants to see it again. He plans to melt the bullet into a cross he’ll wear as a necklace.

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1. President Howard’s Story