CHAPTER 3
As Steve Cochran drove away from the hospital, Anne Bridges was rushed into a trauma room. Nurses were on the phone asking for a doctor and surgeon. No doubt about it: Anne was in trouble. She had lost a lot of blood. Her complexion pale white, cold sweat beading up on her skin, she faded in and out of consciousness.
According to Anne, one unnerving characteristic about people she had grown up with was that, unfortunately, who you were and where you lived was how you were treated in life. Anne had lived during a time and in a place, she insisted, when people, for the most part, “categorized you.” She believed this was why she did not want to admit or talk about what had happened right away.
You see, I was a city clerk. I was not the type of person who should have been with a guy like Jimmy Williams on that night. How we got there, and why I wound up over his house and subsequently fighting for my life, was a complicated story few would understand. But, look, people think: You’re a member of the country club. You work for the city. You’re an upstanding citizen of your community, and you do all this stuff for people. So why in the heck are you with a “con man” like Jimmy Williams?
It’s almost as if you are to blame for the violence perpetrated against you. So, to say the least, I was a bit reluctant going into the hospital. People would judge me. I knew it. This town, when they found out what had happened, was going to be in shock. People would want to point fingers.
Losing blood, bleeding internally, Anne handed the nurse her purse.
“My ID and insurance information is somewhere. . . inside,” she managed to find the strength to say.
The nurses wanted personal information from Anne, not to mention what happened and who had hurt her. They needed to get as much information as they could, as quickly as possible, in case Anne did not make it.
“My sister,” Anne said next. “Please contact my sister. Joyce is her name. Joyce. Please . . . let her know where I am . . . what’s happening.”
“The number, ma’am? Can you tell me your sister’s phone number?”
Anne spoke it clearly, slowly. It took some time to get the words out, but she was able to remember.
The pain was beginning to stifle anything Anne tried to do. She could not move her body any longer. She was losing her train of thought. She couldn’t lift her hands. Her entire body began to ache and throb. Nurses helped Anne onto a gurney. Doctors rushed in.
“What happened?” someone asked.
No response.
“Ma’am, what happened to you?”
Anne was fading.
“Ma’am, stay with us, please. We need to know what happened so we can treat you.”
Anne understood what was being said, but finding the words and the strength to explain was beyond difficult.
“Shot,” Anne finally blurted out. “Shot in the . . . back.”
They flipped Anne on her side. Her back, nurses and doctors could now see, was riddled with tiny puncture wounds.
“Buckshot?” someone suggested.
“Maybe.”
Had to be. Scores of welts and BB-like holes were spread across Anne’s back and even up toward her neck and shoulders.
“A deputy is on the way,” a nurse said to Anne. “Please try to stay with us.”
* * *
The Wilcox County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) in Camden is housed inside a three-story, redbrick building. It features white columns and a triangular peak on the front edge of the roof, greeting those who walk through the front doors. The building and its surrounding landscape of trimmed forest-green bushes and turf-cut, golf-course-like lawn, always freshly groomed, scream of the Deep South. Its elegant charm and comforting appeal give the place its homey atmosphere.
According to the WCSO’s mission statement, law enforcement is the “highest priority” and the “most sacred service” the county can offer its citizens. Each and every day on the job, WCSO officers strive to achieve this goal: “Preservation of human life.” The department stands behind this saying as its number one priority. The WCSO sheriff and deputies are dedicated to public safety, at any cost. That is the mission.
The Wilcox County Sheriff’s Office, housed in the Courthouse Annex, responded to a call about a woman who had been shot in the back and dropped off at the emergency room. (Photo by author)
The previous evening, April 17, 1998, at 10:44 P.M., the Wilcox County 911 communications system took a call from an operator at a neighboring police department in Selma. It was a strange call, the operator explained when she phoned the WCSO. It was kind of confusing and bizarre. Not the type of call the 911 system in those parts was used to getting.
“An anonymous caller,” the Selma operator explained to a Wilcox County deputy, “phoned our 911 system to report that one James Williams had shot someone at his Steel Bridge Road residence in Shawnee. The caller then hung up. We traced the number and called it back.”
“Hello?” the person who answered said, the man’s voice was “slurred.” He was obviously intoxicated.
“Could I have your name, sir?” the officer asked.
“Jimmy Williams.” Without hesitating.
“Is there an issue there at your residence, Mr. Williams?”
“There are no problems,” Jimmy said.
He hung up.
Ten minutes later the officer phoned back.
“Listen to me, I am trying to get some sleep,” Jimmy Williams said sternly. “Stop calling here.”
The officer did nothing more.
In a county the size of a small town, inhabited by about twelve thousand total souls, nothing happens without mostly everyone in law enforcement knowing about it. What’s more, any call the WCSO receives involving extreme violence is fairly rare. So, at 1:51 A.M., on April 18, nearly three hours after that earlier (strange) 911 call had come in, it raised alarms when the WCSO heard from nurses about a patient who’d been dropped off with severe, “potentially deadly” gunshot wounds. Deputy Terry Mack grabbed his radio, fastened his duty belt, tossed on his Stetson, hit the squad car lights and siren, and hauled ass down the road en route to the hospital.
* * *
Inside the ER, Anne Bridges was fighting for her life. Up to this point she’d been strong and fought hard. But her body was now shutting down. Her heart could not function much longer without moderate blood pressure and flow. Regarding the pain, Anne said later, “I don’t recall at this time any pain from the gunshot wounds.”
One of those small, steel buckshot BBs had pierced Anne’s diaphragm—which collapsed her lungs—and punctured a small section of her liver. One BB also lodged in her shoulder, just a hair away from a main artery.
Anne’s lungs were filling with blood.
Near this time, Anne recalled lying on a gurney inside the trauma room, staring up at the ceiling, the bright fluorescent lights buzzing, shining down on her. People—nurses and doctors—stood over her, scrambling to work on Anne. She felt peaceful, actually, she said later. Like everything was happening in slow motion, and everything was going to be okay.
Then a sheriff’s deputy, as if on cue, appeared over her, his broad shoulders and Stetson shading the lights.
Anne could barely make him out.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Deputy Terry Mack. Can you answer a few questions for me, ma’am?”
Anne nodded affirmatively.
“Who did this?”
“Jimmy . . . His name is Jimmy . . . Williams.”
Terry Mack wrote it down. Anne’s voice was fatigued and phlegmy. She coughed, clearing her throat a lot before talking. The pain in her abdomen was now beginning to make her wince. She could hardly make it out, but it appeared as though one of the doctors had some sort of tube in his hand. It was pointed sharply at one end, with little holes along the sides.
“Address for Mr. Williams, ma’am?”
Anne managed to spit it out.
“Can you tell me what happened?” the deputy then asked.
“He’s armed and dangerous, be careful,” Anne warned.
“Ma’am, what happened to you?”
Anne was fading. She began to speak. She began to explain what happened and how she wound up at Jimmy’s that night. She began to talk through how things went from a friendly visit, to a deadly confrontation, to Anne scrambling, then running, and later fighting for her life. As she spoke, the lights and the image of the deputy leaning over her began to fade and blur, becoming fuzzy like a dream scene in a movie.
A chest tube is a plastic apparatus with holes in it, just as Anne Bridges had thought she’d seen on that night in the hands of a doctor. One end is pointed like a ground stake so it can be easily pierced into your side in an emergency situation. Doctors had several ready to go. The idea is to place the tube into that space between the inner lining of your ribs and the outer lining of your chest cavity. It’s called the “pleural space.” They do this when patients experience symptoms of lung collapse. Inserting the chest tube with a powerful jab and quick push allows your lungs to expand fully. Doing this would, in effect, keep Anne alive.
If it worked.
As Anne vaguely recalled seeing those plastic tubes being prepared, she thought she heard a familiar voice.
She focused on it.
“What is happening?” Anne thought she heard the voice ask. “Is she okay. Will she survive?”
“Is that my sister?” Anne said aloud.
“It is,” someone said.
“And that was the last thing I remembered,” Anne recalled, “for, oh, about two weeks.”