A year later, the bullet still in his head, Brill carries on with the love of his wife and the memory of his friend.
Misti Crane, The Columbus Dispatch
Much of what happened after that horrific moment in August 2001 remains fuzzy, but Whitehall Police Officer Eric Brill clearly recalls Bela Mozer firing the shot that destroyed his left eye.
“I remember hearing the bullet and spinning around,” Brill said. “I could see blood going pretty fast through my good eye.”
With a bullet lodged in his head and blood cascading down his face, he ran and radioed for help even as he suffered a stroke. As Whitehall medics put him in an ambulance, risking their own lives while Mozer shot at other officers who had arrived, Brill’s thoughts immediately turned to his lifeline.
He’d told Melody Chambers that his job wasn’t that risky. After four years of dating, they were to be married in two months.
“She’s going to be pissed,” he told the medics, directing them how to reach the woman with whom he soon would embark on a recovery that would be sometimes physically painful, always emotionally so.
“She was my big concern. The thought of leaving her by herself. . . . I remember saying, ‘Don’t let me die.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to get ahold of her.’ ”
As the ambulance doors swung open at Grant Medical Center, Brill blacked out. Not until the next day did fellow officers tell him that Mozer had killed Officer Terry McDowell before he turned the gun on himself.
“I remember feeling my heart go down to my stomach,” Brill said. “I had no idea he had even been hurt.”
At first, he refused to believe it. Now, days don’t pass without thoughts of McDowell.
Along with the loss of a friend and a brother on the force, Brill lost an eye and his career as a street officer.
“Just the shock wave of the bullet going through there ruptured his eye,” said Dr. Kenneth Cahill, an ophthalmologist who operated on Brill’s eye.
The .357-caliber bullet shattered the paper-thin floor of the orbit -- the bony cavity in which the eyeball sits -- and trailed back behind his right eye, stopping just shy of his brain and carotid artery.
The bullet still rests there.
“On one hand, it is very tragic that he lost his eye, but the bullet was probably a quarter of an inch from killing him,” Cahill said.
Cahill was the first doctor with whom Melody spoke after the Friday shooting.
“I said to him, ‘I don’t care about his eye, I didn’t expect him to be alive,’ ” she said. “I don’t think I really felt like I knew until late Saturday or even Sunday that he was going to live.”
With her parents ready to send the invitations to an October wedding, Melody asked the doctor whether such plans still were reasonable.
She didn’t know it at the time, but Cahill, who responded with a strong “Yes,” was a nervous wreck.
“I basically just stuck my neck out,” he said, explaining that he thought a hopeful answer was best.
By Monday, Brill began cracking jokes and having conversations.
The next day, Cahill and plastic surgeon Dr. Majed Tahboub repaired the entry wound on his cheek, reconstructed the floor of his left orbit and inserted a round implant to support his prosthetic eye.
The bullet, which wasn’t removed because of the risk, should pose no long-term danger, Cahill said.
Brill, 32, doesn’t care much that the bullet is there.
Initially, Melody, 29, was more troubled.
“When I first heard it, it was bothersome,” she said. “It’s a piece of something that changed our lives and ended a brother’s life.”
Twelve days after Brill entered the hospital, he returned home to an apartment that he and his fiancee shared. He stood on the front porch, looked around and savored the moment.
“I will never take a breath of air for granted anymore,” he said.
He recovered at home, taking a year off the force. Melody’s employer, The Limited, allowed her to take time off to care for him.
A faint pink spot now hints at the blast he took, and his left eye looks slightly different from his right. A stranger probably wouldn’t notice anything amiss.
The short-term memory loss he suffered because of the stroke is subsiding. Damaged facial nerves are healing, bringing stabs of pain but helping to eliminate numbness in his left cheek.
“I can be happy for that pain,” he said.
Doctors credit his excellent recovery not only to Brill’s strength but also to the steadfast support of the woman who now is his wife.
“I think she was there like 24 hours a day,” said Dr. Julie Rindler, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist.
“She was a team player. She was willing to help him with anything.”
Having abandoned his original plans to fight for a his job on the streets, Brill is settling into an administrative position with the Whitehall police. And he is eager to train for the critical-incident team, which helps officers cope with shootings and other psychologically challenging episodes.
Mrs. Brill hopes to help spouses and other relatives whose lives are affected by violence on the job.
Although their traditional Scottish wedding last October afforded the Brills an opportunity to share their love with 250 family members and friends, Mrs. Brill says the union truly took place on an awful summer day last year, when the joys of engagement were engulfed by the greatest challenge either had encountered.
“I knew we were in it for the long haul,” she said.
And while Mr. Brill commends his doctors and credits God for his life, his wife, he said, “holds me together.”
The wedding album on the Brills’ coffee table is filled with the usual contents: shots of a glowing, lovely bride and an ever-smiling groom, of joyful family and friends.
But there was more.
Before the celebration, a single bagpiper played Amazing Grace and a memorial candle was lighted, for beloved deceased grandparents and for a fallen friend.
“A lot of cops had tears in their eyes that day,” Mr. Brill remembered.
“I didn’t want to set the tone of my wedding on a somber note, but there were people who should have been there that day,” Mrs. Brill said. “On our happy day, there was still a great deal of sadness.”
Sadness remains, and lives have been changed throughout Whitehall and in the Brills’ New Albany home.
Rather than be consumed with what Mozer took away, they prefer to cherish what he could not.